I used to get dazzled with all the splendour of palaces and Churches; these last are so full of the glorification of great men—the monuments and ornamentation are so obtrusive that there seems scarcely any room for prayer. San Marco itself, dream of beauty as it is, inspires less devotion than many a humble country Church without a single work of art to recommend it. Without the ineffable Presence in the Tabernacle I should have felt more piously disposed at the foot of the lonely shrine out in the Lagoon, where the Blessed Madonna’s picture smiles down from its tall tarred post on the flowers that one or other of her children brings there every day. The water laps gently at her feet, the sky arches blue overhead, and one can dream very good and happy dreams as one gazes up at her. But in San Marco, just as in the Doges’ Palace, one is teased by two things—the necessity of thought and appreciation, and that horrid sense one has in so many places in Italy, of all the prying irreverence that expert—sceptic—heretics of the Ruskin tribe have brought to bear on it—as if the cleverest ant that ever crawled and builded underground could measure the courses of the stars! To forget, and rest from, other people’s thoughts, I used to walk a good deal through those narrow, noiseless streets where never hoof or wheel comes to break the stillness, where old houses lean close to share old secrets, and the shadows lie clear and cool through most of the daylight hours. When the sun does strike down he turns the grey to gold, seems to gather up all the perfume of the small hidden gardens and fling it to you with a laugh on a spray of jessamine that has tossed itself over some ancient wall, or a tangle of red carnations spilling down through the scrollwork of a balcony projecting the wide curve of its iron bars far overhead, above the street. Through a half-open _portone_, dull green, like the narrow canals in the shade, you catch a glimpse of a courtyard deep sunk between high walls that are dimpled and lichened to indescribable richness of colour, and gleaming here and there with some lovely fragment of bas-relief. Cupid with one wing gone and half a bow—a row of bursting pomegranates trailing off into nothing—a few letters of some once pompous inscription—who knows, who cares? They served out their own uses centuries ago and were stuck in here to corner a window frame, to key an arch, to replace a brick, but the sun and the rain and the salt sweetness of Adriatic airs have fused and mellowed them to the gold-white tint of fresh curds, smoothed their marbled surface to the velvet uniformity of magnolia petals. There is a fountain in the courtyard, of course, a rough half shell of stone set into the wall, where a slow jet trickles all day long and is just now spilling over the brim of the red copper “conca” that some woman has set a-tilt below it—and forgotten, perhaps, to run upstairs and pull in the wire that