real spirit of adventure for which his subject was always a
cluster of accidents; not an obvious order, but a sort of peopled
and agitated chapter of life, in which the figures are submissive
pictorial notes. These notes are all there in their beauty and
heterogeneity, and if the abundance is of a kind to make the
principle of selection seem in comparison timid, yet the sense of
"composition" in the spectator--if it happen to exist--reaches
out to the painter in peculiar sympathy. Dull must be the spirit
of the worker tormented in any field of art with that particular
question who is not moved to recognise in the eternal problem the
high fellowship of Tintoretto.

If the long reach from this point to the deplorable iron bridge
which discharges the pedestrian at the Academy--or, more
comprehensively, to the painted and gilded Gothic of the noble
Palazzo Foscari--is too much of a curve to be seen at any one
point as a whole, it represents the better the arched neck, as it
were, of the undulating serpent of which the Canalazzo has the
likeness. We pass a dozen historic houses, we note in our passage
a hundred component "bits," with the baffled sketcher's sense,
and with what would doubtless be, save for our intensely Venetian
fatalism, the baffled sketcher's temper. It is the early palaces,
of course, and also, to be fair, some of the late, if we could
take them one by one, that give the Canal the best of its grand
air. The fairest are often cheek-by-jowl with the foulest, and
there are few, alas, so fair as to have been completely protected
by their beauty. The ages and the generations have worked their
will on them, and the wind and the weather have had much to say;
but disfigured and dishonoured as they are, with the bruises of
their marbles and the patience of their ruin, there is nothing