is completely impossible. This is often very annoying; you can
only turn your back on your impertinent playfellow and curse his
want of delicacy. But this is not the fault of Venice; it is the
fault of the rest of the world. The fault of Venice is that,
though she is easy to admire, she is not so easy to live with as
you count living in other places. After you have stayed a week
and the bloom of novelty has rubbed off you wonder if you can
accommodate yourself to the peculiar conditions. Your old habits
become impracticable and you find yourself obliged to form new
ones of an undesirable and unprofitable character. You are tired
of your gondola (or you think you are) and you have seen all the
principal pictures and heard the names of the palaces announced a
dozen times by your gondolier, who brings them out almost as
impressively as if he were an English butler bawling titles into
a drawing-room. You have walked several hundred times round the
Piazza and bought several bushels of photographs. You have
visited the antiquity mongers whose horrible sign-boards
dishonour some of the grandest vistas in the Grand Canal; you
have tried the opera and found it very bad; you have bathed at
the Lido and found the water flat. You have begun to have a
shipboard-feeling--to regard the Piazza as an enormous saloon
and the Riva degli Schiavoni as a promenade-deck. You are
obstructed and encaged; your desire for space is unsatisfied; you
miss your usual exercise. You try to take a walk and you fail,
and meantime, as I say, you have come to regard your gondola as a
sort of magnified baby's cradle. You have no desire to be rocked
to sleep, though you are sufficiently kept awake by the
irritation produced, as you gaze across the shallow lagoon, by
the attitude of the perpetual gondolier, with his turned-out
toes, his protruded chin, his absurdly unscientific stroke. The