antidote to pedantry, and you can complain of them only if you
never cross their thresholds. If you take this step you are lost,
for you have parted with the correctness of your attitude. Venice
becomes frankly from such a moment the big depressing dazzling
joke in which after all our sense of her contradictions sinks to
rest--the grimace of an over-strained philosophy. It's rather a
comfort, for the curiosity-shops are amusing. You have bad
moments indeed as you stand in their halls of humbug and, in the
intervals of haggling, hear through the high windows the soft
splash of the sea on the old water-steps, for you think with
anger of the noble homes that are laid waste in such scenes, of
the delicate lives that must have been, that might still be, led
there. You reconstruct the admirable house according to your own
needs; leaning on a back balcony, you drop your eyes into one of
the little green gardens with which, for the most part, such
establishments are exasperatingly blessed, and end by feeling it
a shame that you yourself are not in possession. (I take for
granted, of course, that as you go and come you are, in
imagination, perpetually lodging yourself and setting up your
gods; for if this innocent pastime, this borrowing of the mind,
be not your favourite sport there is a flaw in the appeal that
Venice makes to you.) There may be happy cases in which your envy
is tempered, or perhaps I should rather say intensified, by real
participation. If you have had the good fortune to enjoy the
hospitality of an old Venetian home and to lead your life a
little in the painted chambers that still echo with one of the
historic names, you have entered by the shortest step into the
inner spirit of the place. If it did n't savour of treachery to
private kindness I should like to speak frankly of one of these
delightful, even though alienated, structures, to refer to it as