234 ST. MARK’S REST

talk another day.¹ I only asked you to look at the fresco just now, because therein is seen the end of my Venice,-the Venice I have to tell you of. Yours, of the Grand Hotels and the Peninsular steamers, you may write the history of, for yourself.

Therein,-as it fades away-ends the Venice of St. Mark’s Rest. But where she was born, you may now go quite down the steps to see. Down, and through among the fruit-stalls, into the little square on the right; then turning back, the low portico is in front of you;-not of the ancient church indeed, but of a fifteenth-century one-variously translated, in succeeding times, into such small picturesqueness of stage effect as it yet possesses; escaping, by God’s grace, however, the fire which destroyed all the other buildings of ancient Venice, round her Rialto square, in 1513.*

33. Some hundred or hundred and fifty years before that, Venice had begun to suspect the bodies of saints to be a poor property; carrion, in fact,-and not even exchangeable carrion. Living flesh might be bought instead,-perhaps of prettier aspect.² So, as I said, for a hundred years or so, she had brought home no relics,-but set her mind on trade-profits, and other practical matters; tending to the achievement of wealth, and its comforts, and dignities. The curious result being, that at that particular moment, when the fire devoured her merchants’ square,-centre of the then mercantile world,-she happened to have no money in her pocket to build it again with.

34. Nor were any of her old methods of business again to be resorted to. Her soldiers were now foreign mercenaries, and had to be paid before they would fight; and

* Many chronicles speak of it as burned; but the authoritative inscription of 1601 speaks of it as “consumed by age,” and is therefore conclusive on this point.³

¹ [This, however, was not done.]

² [See Cicogna, Iscrizioni Veneziane, vol. vi. p. 525, for notices of the slavetrade at Venice.]

³ [“Vetustate ruentem”: the inscription may be read in a note to the Italian translation of St. Mark’s Rest, p. 41.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]