xlii INTRODUCTION

numerous studies for the St. George’s Guild. To his friendship with Count Zorzi at this time reference is made below. His diary mentions also visits to the Countess Isobel Curtis-Cholmeley in Bermani, to whom a reference is made in St. Mark’s Rest (p. 264), and to Browning’s friend, Mrs. Arthur Bronson. He was surrounded with friends and pupils; immersed in his own work, yet interested also in theirs¹; sketching, copying, talking, writing. Rest-the one thing which the doctors told him he needed-was the one thing which he had no time to take.

Of a typical day at Venice, Ruskin wrote an account to Professor Norton.² He was up with the dawn to watch the sunrise from his balcony. By seven he was at his writing-table, translating Plato, “to build the day on.” At half-past seven the gondola was waiting to take him to the bridge before SS. Giovanni e Paolo, where he painted the Scuola di San Marco, with vista of the canal to Murano; “It’s a great Canaletto view,” he says, “and I’m painting it against him.”³ At nine Ruskin returned to breakfast, and did some writing. Then at half-past ten to the Academy, where he made his studies of Carpaccio till two o’clock. Then home to read and write letters till three, at which hour he dined. At half-past four gondola again-to Murano, or the Armenian Convent, or St. Elena, or San Giorgio-Ruskin sketching, and on the way home taking an oar himself. Tea at seven, and, afterwards, evenings spent with his friends or with his studies in Venetian history for St. Mark’s Rest.

Ruskin plunged deep, as was his wont, into his subject, and collected more materials than he was to find time or strength to use. He rose with the dawn, and worked hard all day, except for his afternoon row on the lagoons; but “the accurately divided day,” he says in his diary (October 19), “rushes round like a paddle-wheel, or rather invisibly sliding like a screw.” “A thousand things in my head,” he says again (December 29), “pushing each other like shoals of minnows.” The History of Venice, written for the help of the few travellers who still care for her monuments,⁴ was but a fragment of what its author designed; while other books that he planned were never to see the light at all. Thus the complete Guide to the Works of Carpaccio, promised in the Academy Guide (below, pp. 163, 179), was afterwards abandoned (see p. 366); while a sequel to the Laws of Fésole, intended to define the principles of Venetian colouring, never advanced beyond a title-page⁵

¹ See his account of Miss Trotter’s sketches in Art of England, § 21.

² Letter of October 5, 1876 (printed in a later volume of this edition).

³ See the letter of October 24, above, p. xxxix.

⁴ The sub-title of St. Mark’s Rest.

⁵ Ruskin gives this in his diary (December 31, 1876): “The name of my drawingbook came to me this morning as I was dressing (‘Pax tibi Marce, here shall thy

[Version 0.04: March 2008]