towers and single massive dome, its majestic breadth of steps rising from
the water's edge, and the many-statued sculpture of its facade. Strangers
go there to see the splendor of its high altar (where the melodramatic
Madonna, as the centre of a marble group, responds to the prayer of the
operatic Venezia, and drives away the haggard, theatrical Pest), and the
excellent Titians and the grand Tintoretto in the sacristy.

The Salute is one of the great show-churches, like that of San Giovanni e
Paolo, which the common poverty of imagination has decided to call the
Venetian Westminster Abbey, because it contains many famous tombs and
monuments. But there is only one Westminster Abbey; and I am so far a
believer in the perfectibility of our species as to suppose that vergers
are nowhere possible but in England. There would be nothing to say, after
Mr. Ruskin, in praise or blame of the great monuments in San Giovanni e
Paolo, even if I cared to discuss them; I only wonder that, in speaking of
the bad art which produced the tomb of the Venieri, he failed to mention
the successful approach to its depraved feeling, made by the single figure
sitting on the case of a slender shaft, at the side of the first altar on
the right of the main entrance. I suppose this figure typifies Grief, but
it really represents a drunken woman, whose drapery has fallen, as if in
some vile debauch, to her waist, and who broods, with a horrible, heavy
stupor and chopfallen vacancy, on something which she supports with her
left hand upon her knee. It is a round of marble, and if you have the
daring to peer under the arm of the debauchee, and look at it as she does,
you find that it contains the bass-relief of a skull in bronze. Nothing
more ghastly and abominable than the whole thing can be conceived, and it
seemed to me the fit type of the abandoned Venice which produced it; for
one even less Ruskinian than I might have fancied that in the sculptured
countenance could be seen the dismay of the pleasure-wasted harlot of the
sea when, from time to time, death confronted her amid her revels.