We have visited half the churches, picture-hunting: and a queer thing it is to drive up to a noble portico in your gondola, to land and find yourself in one of the noblest edifices of Europe. Then the sea-breezes fan the shrines; and sometimes the spray and surf is leaping about them, as if they were rocks on a strand. This applies only to those that stand a little removed from the bulk of the town, and exposed to the sweep of the port. But St. Mark’s is as quaint internally as on its exterior. It is an odd jumble of magnificence, and of tastes that are almost barbarous. The imitation mosaics, in particular, are something like what one might expect to see at the court of the Incas. The pavement of this church is undulating, like low waves—a sort of sleeping ground-swell. C—— thinks it is intentional, by way of marine poetry, to denote the habits of the people; but I fancy it is more probably poetic justice, a reward for not driving home the piles. The effect is odd, for you almost fancy you are afloat as you walk over the undulating surface. St. Mark’s, if not the very oldest, is _one_ of the oldest Christian churches now standing. There were older, of course, in Asia Minor; but they stand no longer,—or if they do stand, they have ceased to be Christian churches. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu says, if it were the fashion to go naked, the beauties of the human _form_ are so much superior to that of the _face_, that no one would regard the latter. Clothes have produced a different effect on the art of painting. All the painters who create or revive their art commence with the countenance, which they paint well long before they can draw the form at all. You may see this in America, where the art is still in its infancy, in one sense; many drawing good heads, who make sad work with the body and the hands. The works of the old masters exhibit heavenly countenances on spider’s limbs, as any one knows who has ever seen a picture by Giotto. A picture here, by the master of Titian, has much of this about it; but it is a gem, after all. John of Bellino was the painter, and I liked it better than any thing I saw, one fresco painting excepted.