in _her_ time, sniffed, and found little comfort in the reflection
that Shylock must have had a cold in his head. There is comparative warmth
in the broad squares before the churches, but the narrow streets are
bitter thorough-draughts, and fell influenza lies in wait for its prey in
all those picturesque, seducing little courts of which I have spoken.

It is, however, in the churches, whose cool twilight and airy height one
finds so grateful in summer, that the sharpest malice of the winter is
felt; and having visited a score of them soon after my arrival, I deferred
the remaining seventy-five or eighty, together with the gallery of the
Academy, until advancing spring should, in some degree, have mitigated the
severity of their temperature. As far as my imagination affected me, I
thought the Gothic churches much more tolerable than the temples of
Renaissance art. The empty bareness of these, with their huge marbles, and
their soulless splendors of theatrical sculpture, their frescoed roofs and
broken arches, was insufferable. The arid grace of Palladio's architecture
was especially grievous to the sense in cold weather; and I warn the
traveler who goes to see the lovely Madonnas of Bellini to beware how he
trusts himself in winter to the gusty, arctic magnificence of the church
of the Redentore. But by all means the coldest church in the city is that
of the Jesuits, which those who have seen it will remember for its famous
marble drapery. This base, mechanical surprise (for it is a trick and not
art) is effected by inlaying the white marble of columns and pulpits and
altars with a certain pattern of verd-antique. The workmanship is
marvelously skillful, and the material costly, but it only gives the
church the effect of being draped in damask linen; and even where the
marble is carven in vast and heavy folds over a pulpit to simulate a
curtain, or wrought in figures on the steps of the high-altar to represent
a carpet, it has no richness of effect, but a poverty, a coldness, a
harshness indescribably table-clothy. I think all this has tended to chill