12 PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

The architect had read his third part of the Stones of Venice to purpose; and the modern brickwork would have been in no discord with the tomb of Can Grande, had it been set beside it at Verona. But this good and true piece of brickwork was the porch of a public house, and its total motive was the provocation of thirst, and the encouragement of idleness.

3. I drove on to Brentford, and walked over Kew Bridge; the twilight relieving in purple masses the foliage on the Island above it, and glowing on the two reaches of the lovely river, around which modern art is now striving to realise the promise of its poet,

“Hail, sacred Peace! hail, long expected days

That Thames’s glory to the stars shall raise!

Though Tyber’s streams immortal Rome behold,

Though foaming Hermus swells with tides of gold,

From Heaven itself though sevenfold Nilus flows

And harvests on a hundred realms bestows;

These now no more shall be the Muse’s themes,

Lost in my fame, as in the sea their streams,...

No more my sons shall dye with British blood

Red Iber’s sands, or Ister’s foaming flood:

Safe on my shore each unmolested swain

Shall tend the flocks, or reap the bearded grain,...

Behold! th’ ascending villas on my side

Project long shadows o’er the crystal tide;

Behold! Augusta’s glittering spires increase,

And temples rise, the beauteous works of Peace.”¹

With these verses in my mind, I could not but be solemnly impressed by the appearance of a circular temple, built since I last crossed the bridge, some thirty or forty times the size of that (so called) of Vesta, by the Tyber,² which it otherwise in many particulars resembled, no less than that of the Sibyl at Tivoli. Its dark walls and singularly tall and narrow

¹ [Pope: from the speech of the river-god of the Thames in Windsor Forest, 355 seq. The lines are here punctuated in accordance with the poet’s text, and dots are inserted where Ruskin omitted lines. Of these the first two lines in Pope’s original MS. were curiously enough-

“Let Venice boast her towers amid the main,

Where the rough Adrian swells and roars in vain.”]

² [This temple, on the bank of the Tiber near the Ponte Palatino, is now generally supposed to have been that of Mater Matuta.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]