Rousseau and Byron had one feature in common in Venice: neither showed any feeling for the arts. Rousseau, who had wonderful gifts for music, does not seem to know that, near Zulietta, there existed pictures, statues, monuments; and yet with what charm do those master-pieces mate with love, whose object they divine and whose flame they increase! As to Lord Byron, he "loathes the infernal din" of Rubens' colours, he "spits upon" all the pictures of saints with which the churches are glutted; he never met a picture or statue coming within a league of his thought. He prefers to those deceitful arts the beauty of a few mountains, a few seas, a few horses, a certain Morean lion and a tiger which he saw supping in Exeter Change. Is there not a little prejudice in all this? Que d'affectation et de forfanterie[135]! VENICE, _September_ 1833. But what, then, is this town in which all the lofty intelligences have arranged to meet? Some have visited it themselves; others have sent their Muses there. Something would have been lacking to the immortality of those talents, if they had not hung pictures on that temple of voluptuousness and glory. Without again recalling the great poets of Italy, the geniuses of the whole of Europe placed their creations there: there breathed Shakespeare's Desdemona, very different from Rousseau's Zulietta and Byron's Margherita, that chaste Venetian who declares her love to Othello: And bade me, if I had a friend that lov'd her, I should but teach him how to tell my story, And that would woo her[136]. There appeared Otway's[137] Belvidera, who says to Jaffeir: Oh smile, as when our loves were in their spring. . . . . . . . . . Oh lead me to some desert wide and wild, Barren as our misfortunes, where my soul May have its vent, where I may tell aloud To the high heavens, and every list'ning planet, With what a boundless stock my bosom's fraught; Where I may throw my eager arms about thee, Give loose to love, with kisses kindling joy, And let off all the fire that's in my heart[138]. Goethe, in our time, has celebrated Venice, and the gentle Marot[139], who first made his voice heard at the awakening of the French Muses, took refuge in Titian's native place. Montesquieu wrote: "Although one had seen all the cities of the world, there might still be a surprise in store for him in Venice[140]." When, in too undraped a picture, the author of the _Lettres persanes_ depicts a Mussulman woman surrendered in Paradise to two "heavenly men," does he not seem to have painted the courtezan of Rousseau's _Confessions_ and her of Byron's Memoirs? Was not I, between my two Floridans, like Anaïs between her two angels[141]? But the "painted girls" and I were not immortal. [Sidenote: And Corinne.]