274 ST. MARK’S REST

David’s piety, and soldiership, and Solomon’s love of fine things; a perfect man, as I read him, capable at once and gentle,-religious, and joyful,-in the extreme: as a warrior the match of Robert Guiscard, who, you will find, was the soldier par excellence of the Middle Ages,¹ but not his match in the wild-cat cunning:-both of them alike in knightly honour, word being given. As a soldier, I say, the match of Guiscard, but not holding war for the pastime of life, still less for the duty of Venice or her king. Peaceful affairs;-the justice and the joy of human deeds,-in these he sought his power, by principle and passion equally; religious, as we have seen; royal, as we shall presently see; commercial, as we shall finally see; a perfect man, recognized as such with concurrent applause of people and submission of noble: “Domenico Selvo, we will, and we approve.”

No flaw in him, then? Nay; “how bad the best of us!” say Punch,* and the modern evangelical. Flaw he had, such as wisest men are not unliable to, with the strongest-Solomon, Samson, Hercules, Merlin the Magician.

86. Liking pretty things, how could he help liking pretty ladies? He married a Greek maid,² who came with new and strange light on Venetian eyes, and left wild fame of herself: how, every morning, she sent her handmaidens to gather the dew for her to wash with, waters of earth being not pure enough. So, through lapse of fifteen hundred years, descended into her Greek heart that worship in the Temple of the Dew.³

Of this queen’s extreme luxury, and the miraculousness of it in the eyes of simple Venice, many traditions are current among later historians; which, nevertheless, I find

* Epitaph on the Bishop of Winchester-(Wilberforce); see Fors, XLII. p. 125.4

¹ [“Yet twice defeated by Domenico Selvo,” notes Ruskin in his copy; for which defeats, see Pleasures of England, § 78. For other references to Robert Guiscard, see below, p. 432; Vol. XXIII. p. 36; and Fors Clavigera, Letter 43, § 4.]

² [Compare Notes on Prout and Hunt, Vol. XIV. p. 427.]

³ [Compare Queen of the Air, § 38 (Vol. XIX. p. 334.]

⁴ [The reference is to the first octavo edition. Letter 42, § 9.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]