simple in their loveliness, almost happy in their simplicity.
They have kept their brightness through the centuries, and they
shine with their neighbours in those golden rooms. There is a
piece of painting in one of them which is one of the sweetest
things in Venice and which reminds one afresh of those wild
flowers of execution that bloom so profusely and so unheeded in
the dark corners of all of the Tintoret's work. "Pallas chasing
away Mars" is, I believe, the name that is given to the picture;
and it represents in fact a young woman of noble appearance
administering a gentle push to a fine young man in armour, as if
to tell him to keep his distance. It is of the gentleness of this
push that I speak, the charming way in which she puts out her
arm, with a single bracelet on it, and rests her young hand, its
rosy fingers parted, on his dark breastplate. She bends her
enchanting head with the effort--a head which has all the
strange fairness that the Tintoret always sees in women--and the
soft, living, flesh-like glow of all these members, over which
the brush has scarcely paused in its course, is as pretty an
example of genius as all Venice can show. But why speak of the
Tintoret when I can say nothing of the great "Paradise," which
unfolds its somewhat smoky splendour and the wonder of its
multitudinous circles in one of the other chambers? If it were
not one of the first pictures in the world it would be about the
biggest, and we must confess that the spectator gets from it at
first chiefly an impression of quantity. Then he sees that this
quantity is really wealth; that the dim confusion of faces is a
magnificent composition, and that some of the details of this
composition are extremely beautiful. It is impossible however in
a retrospect of Venice to specify one's happiest hours, though
as one looks backward certain ineffaceable moments start here and