INTRODUCTION xxix

the city is handsomer, but the place is not so simple and lovely. I have got/all the right feeling back now, however; and hope to write a word or two about Venice yet, when I have got the mouldings well out of my head-and the mud. For the fact is, with reverence be it spoken, that whereas Rogers says: “There is a glorious city in the Sea,” a truthful person must say, “There is a glorious city in the Mud.” It is startling at first to say so, but it goes well enough with marble, “Oh Queen of Marble and of Mud.”¹

And to Ruskin’s other labours at Venice must be added a labour of love-namely his unfailing daily letter to his father or mother. The series written during the winter of 1849-1850 has not been found among those preserved at Brantwood; the series for the following winter would make a volume hardly less substantial than the present. Among the papers of W. H. Harrison there is, however, a copy of one letter of the earlier period which must have been sent by J. J. Ruskin for his friend’s perusal. This also gives a lively account of the difficulties which Ruskin experienced in his work:-

VENICE, Sunday, 23rd December.

MY DEAREST FATHER,-The cold weather has come back again, but I hope will not stay except to make Xmas look like itself, which, by-the-bye, it does far more than I expected or thought probable in Italy. Their poultry here is very fine, and the Rialto and adjacent streets are lined by stands of it with black feathers in the tails-not unsatisfactory in general effect; there were, too, some specimens of beef in the richer quarters, and the apples and chestnuts make a goodly show everywhere. But there can be little of the merriment of Xmas here-they have as you say, suffered much, and lost all, or nearly so; and the more I see of the town-and I have now explored almost every corner of it-the more my fixed impression is of hopeless ruin; fully concealed by scrabbles of whitewash-or by bad new brickwork-but ruin alike of palace and cot.

A week or two ago I commissioned my valet-de-place to obtain permission for me to draw the windows of the Palazzo Bernardo; he went, as he said, to the Count Bernardo, and I had hope for once of being admitted into a palace by the permission of its rightful owner. I was so-and found myself in a well-furnished room, with, however, the unsuitable adjunct of some clothes drying outside, the window not being the one I wanted. I asked to go upstairs. Alas, the Count owned but a single flat in his family palace-and I have now to get permission from the lodger above. In my walk to-day I passed through

¹ Letter to Professor Charles Eliot Norton, given in his Introduction to the “Brantwood” edition of The Stones of Venice (Travellers’ Edition), p. ix.

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