the analogy was an image the more in a treasure-house of images;
but from a considerable portion of the church it has now
disappeared. Throughout the greater part indeed the pavement
remains as recent generations have known it--dark, rich, cracked,
uneven, spotted with porphyry and time-blackened malachite,
polished by the knees of innumerable worshippers; but in other
large stretches the idea imitated by the restorers is that of the
ocean in a dead calm, and the model they have taken the floor of
a London club-house or of a New York hotel. I think no Venetian
and scarcely any Italian cares much for such differences; and
when, a year ago, people in England were writing to the
Times about the whole business and holding meetings to
protest against it the dear children of the lagoon--so far as
they heard or heeded the rumour--thought them partly busy-bodies
and partly asses. Busy-bodies they doubtless were, but they took
a good deal of disinterested trouble. It never occurs to the
Venetian mind of to-day that such trouble may be worth taking;
the Venetian mind vainly endeavours to conceive a state of
existence in which personal questions are so insipid that people
have to look for grievances in the wrongs of brick and marble. I
must not, however, speak of St. Mark's as if I had the pretension
of giving a description of it or as if the reader desired one.
The reader has been too well served already. It is surely the
best-described building in the world. Open the Stones of
Venice, open Theophile Gautier's ltalia, and you will
see. These writers take it very seriously, and it is only because
there is another way of taking it that I venture to speak of it;
the way that offers itself after you have been in Venice a couple
of months, and the light is hot in the great Square, and you pass
in under the pictured porticoes with a feeling of habit and