day, very much humbler quarters? I am afraid to take the proper
steps for finding out, lest I should learn that during these
years I have misdirected my emotion. A better reason for the
sentiment, at any rate, is that such a great house has surely, in
the high beauty of its tiers, a refinement of its own. They make
one think of colosseums and aqueducts and bridges, and they
constitute doubtless, in Venice, the most pardonable specimen of
the imitative. I have even a timid kindness for the huge Pesaro,
far down the Canal, whose main reproach, more even than the
coarseness of its forms, is its swaggering size, its want of
consideration for the general picture, which the early examples
so reverently respect. The Pesaro is as far out of the frame as a
modern hotel, and the Cornaro, close to it, oversteps almost
equally the modesty of art. One more thing they and their kindred
do, I must add, for which, unfortunately, we can patronise them
less. They make even the most elaborate material civilisation of
the present day seem woefully shrunken and bourgeois, for
they simply--I allude to the biggest palaces--can't be lived in
as they were intended to be. The modern tenant may take in all
the magazines, but he bends not the bow of Achilles. He occupies
the place, but he doesn't fill it, and he has guests from the
neighbouring inns with ulsters and Baedekers. We are far at the
Pesaro, by the way, from our attaching window, and we take
advantage of it to go in rather a melancholy mood to the end.
The long straight vista from the Foscari to the Rialto, the
great middle stretch of the Canal, contains, as the phrase is, a
hundred objects of interest, but it contains most the bright
oddity of its general Deluge air. In all these centuries it has
never got over its resemblance to a flooded city; for some reason
or other it is the only part of Venice in which the houses look