was the opinion of those who were there that they were worth a hundred thousand ducats. Their faces were superbly painted, and so also the rest of them that was bare.” The account of this sumptuous interior is peculiarly valuable when we realise the date to which it belongs, the period of the first greatness of Venetian Art, a period which has been sometimes regarded as one of almost naïve simplicity. Casola, with his customary exactitude, dwells on the frugality of Venetian gentlemen in the matter of food--a frugality that caused the guest to reflect that the Venetians cared more to feed the eye than the palate. It was not yet the period of the sumptuous living deplored by Calmo only half a century later. Casola was a more secularly minded pilgrim than the priest of Florence, Ser Michele, who paid five visits to the bones of the Holy Innocents at Murano, and only at the fifth visit was counted worthy, as he humbly deemed, to see the relics: Providence, in the form of the sacristan, having till then failed him. The more festive Casola--who paid repeated visits to Rialto, “which seemed to be the source of all the gardens in the world,” who spent one day in vain attempts to count the multitudinous boats in and about the city, and who was so frivolous, for all his long white beard, as to buy a false front on the piazza--in the midst of his expatiations on the Venetian maidens, pulls himself suddenly together with a sense of incongruity between his diversions and his goal, and shakes himself free from the allurements of Venice, crying: “But I am a priest, in the way of the saints; I did not try to look into their lives any further. To me it seemed better, as I have said above, to go in search of the churches and monasteries and to see the relics of which there are so many. And this seemed to me a good work for a pilgrim who was awaiting the departure of the vessel to go to the Holy Sepulchre, bringing the time to an end as well as he could.” In the Accademia at Venice there is a curious little painting, attributed to Carpaccio, of the assembly of the martyrs of Mount Ararat in the Church of Sant’ Antonio di Castello, which stood once on the site of the Public Gardens. It was a familiar sight for Venice, the dedication of pilgrims that is represented here; and there is a strange pathos in the slim, small figures as they move in two lines half-wavering up the aisle, each wearing a crown of thorns, perhaps in prophecy of coming martyrdom. They are not marching confidently to victory like an army; their crosses are held at all angles, forming errant patterns among themselves. Some are girt for their journey in short vestments under their long robes. It is curiously unlike a procession native to the city; there is a dreamlike, mystic quality about it and a lack of body in its motion which is enhanced, perhaps, by the extreme detail with which the interior of the church is transcribed--the models of vessels in the rafters; the votive limbs