XXX. THE VESTIBULE 413

but fenced from the high road, for magnificence’ sake, with goodly posts and chains; then another, of Kew Gothic,¹ with Chinese variations, painted red and green; a third composed for the greater part of dead wall, with fictitious windows painted upon it, each with a pea-green blind, and a classical architrave in bad perspective; and a fourth, with stucco figures set on the top of its garden-wall: some antique, like the kind to be seen at the corner of the New Road,² and some of clumsy grotesque dwarfs, with fat bodies and large boots. This is the architecture to which her studies of the Renaissance have conducted modern Italy.

§ 8. The sun climbs steadily, and warms into intense white the walls of the little piazza of Dolo, where we change horses. Another dreary stage among the now divided branches of the Brenta, forming irregular and half-stagnant canals; with one or two more villas on the other side of them, but these of the old Venetian type, which we may have recognised before at Padua, and sinking fast into utter ruin, black, and rent, and lonely, set close to the edge of the dull water, with what were once small gardens beside them, kneaded into mud, and with blighted fragments of gnarled hedges and broken stakes from their fencing; and here and there a few fragments of marble steps, which have once given them graceful access from the water’s edge, now setting into the mud in broken joints, all aslope, and slippery with green weed. At last the road turns sharply to the north, and there is an open space covered with bent grass, on the right of it: but do not look that way.

§ 9. Five minutes more, and we are in the upper room of the little inn at Mestre, glad of a moment’s rest in shade. The table is (always, I think) covered with a cloth of nominal white and perennial grey, with plates and glasses at due intervals, and small loaves of a peculiar white bread, made

¹ [The phrase refers to the modern Gothic villas at Kew, with perhaps an allusion also to the Chinese Pagoda in the Gardens. Compare the phrase “Twickenham Classicism” in Pre-Raphaelitism, § 37.]

² [The Euston Road, formerly called the New Road, still contains, on its southern side, some statuary yards, such as that to which Ruskin refers.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]