Yet Montaigne has something to say about Venice that cancels all the intervening years and changes, and brings him into touch with us. He went his way towards it with the highest expectations, explored it eagerly, recollected it with the keenest pleasure: yet at the end of his second day there his feeling was one of disappointment. It may be taken as characteristic that he alone should experience then what seems more appropriate to the present; more probably, other visitors shared it but were too much subject to convention to say so; or, perhaps, re-writing their experiences later at home, as they generally did, they record their later thought only, whereas Montaigne left his unrevised and unashamed. This explanation seems the more reasonable inasmuch as the causes of the feeling had already come into being. On the surface the sight rested satisfied, while the imagination remained as hungry as ever. In a country, France, for instance, the tourist always had a consciousness of towns and districts unseen, all of which had contributed to the past, for evidence of the existence of which the imagination looks, however unconsciously; but after two days in Venice, all that is important and visible may seem to have been seen; no suggestion of anything beyond, not even the ruins of a half-buried city, as at Rome. It is true it was clear then that the word "Venice" meant an Empire as well as a city, though by the time the tourist had reached the city, he had passed through the conquests, barring an island or two in the Levant which the Turks were in course of subtracting. Yet the third meaning of the name was as dim to him as both the second and the third are to most of us, that of the source of an Empire, the whole collection of islands in the lagoons, whose larger life had already been drained away into the central settlement, but where Venice and its history were equally discoverable—but not in two days. Another similarity between Venice of old and of to-day lies in the fact that the gondoliers knew much better than the visitors whither the latter wanted to go and took them there, with, or against, orders; only with this difference, that then it was always to the house of the courtesan in whose pay he was. When the tourist had released himself and was proceeding on his way to Rome there were the beacons dotted along the coast for him to notice, beacons for signalling the sighting of a Turk or corsair vessel from south to north in a few hours. Ravenna received little notice, Rimini less, but Ancona was kept in the memory by one of those rhymes characteristic of the contemporary guide-book. Unus Deus, Una Roma, Unus turris, in Cremona, Una portus, in Ancona.