xxxvi INTRODUCTION

the 21st, and I think they will bear comparison with anything in The Seven Lamps, though they do not treat of such high matters. There may perhaps be a little want of spirit in me at present, owing partly to the watching my health, and partly to the various little mortifications and anxieties which, while they do not disturb me in any straightforward work of inquiry and examination, may perhaps, without my knowing it, deaden the tone, and render lax the spring of a written sentence-just as they might a little deaden the eye or lower the voice. But I trust when you see the whole book together, with such retouching as I may be able to give it at home, that you will not think my twelve months in Venice have been misspent. I should say that I have great confidence in producing an impression with it, but my confidence has been now too often disappointed. I thought all The Seven Lamps would have sold within a year after the book was published; and though I did not suppose myself to have as many friends as the hare,¹ I thought there were more than fifteen people in London who would have given a guinea for five drawings with which I had taken all the pains I could. So I will be confident no more, but finish what has cost me thus much labour as well as I can, and then trouble myself as little as I can about it.

VENICE, Feb. 18, 1852.-I am sorry you are not at all interested in my antiquarianism, but I believe you will like the book better when you see it finished; at all events, it would be foolish to abandon the labour of two whole years, now that it is just approaching completion. I cannot write anything but what is in me and interests me. I never could write for the public-I never have written except under the conviction of a thing’s being important, wholly irrespective of the public’s thinking it so; and all my power, such as it is, would be lost, the moment I tried to catch people by fine writing. You know I promised them no Romance, I promised them stones. Not even bread. I do not feel any Romance in Venice. It is simply a heap of ruins, trodden under foot by such men as Ezekiel describes, xxi. 31;² and this is the great fact which I want to teach,-to give Turneresque descriptions of the thing would not have needed ten days’ study or residence. I believe that what I have done will be found useful at last. You say Fergusson and others can give details. Yes, but they can’t put the details together; besides they are not here to do it. If Fergusson

¹ See Gay’s Fables, No. 50 (“The Hare and many Friends”); and so Swift (Libel on Dr. Delany):-

Thus Gay the hare with many friends

Twice seven long years the court attends.

² “And I will pour out mine indignation upon thee; I will blow against thee in the fire of my wrath, and deliver thee into the hand of brutish men, and skilful to destroy.”

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