ts with hoods, and lie down on
the stone or marble pavement until they are wanted again. So that when I
come in or go out, on foot--which can be done from this house for some
miles, over little bridges and by narrow ways--I usually walk over the
principal of my vassals, whose custom it is to snore immediately across
the doorway. Conceive the oddity of the most familiar things in this
place, from one instance: Last night we go downstairs at half-past
eight, step into the gondola, slide away on the black water, ripple and
plash swiftly along for a mile or two, land at a broad flight of steps,
and instantly walk into the most brilliant and beautiful theatre
conceivable--all silver and blue, and precious little fringes made of
glittering prisms of glass. There we sit until half-past eleven, come
out again (gondolier asleep outside the box-door), and in a moment are
on the black silent water, floating away as if there were no dry
building in the world. It stops, and in a moment we are out again, upon
the broad solid Piazza of St. Mark, brilliantly lighted with gas, very
like the Palais Royal at Paris, only far more handsome, and shining with
no end of caffes. The two old pillars and the enormous bell-tower are as
gruff and solid against the exquisite starlight as if they were a
thousand miles from the sea or any undermining water: and the front of
the cathedral, overlaid with golden mosaics and beautiful colours, is
like a thousand rainbows even in the night."

His formerly expressed notions as to art and pictures in Italy received
confirmation at this visit. "I am more than ever confirmed in my
conviction that one of the great uses of travelling is to encourage a
man to think for himself, to be bold enough always to declare without
offence that he _does_ think for himself, and to overcome the villainous
meanness of professing what other people have professed when he knows
(if he has capacity to originate an opinion) that his profession is
untrue. The intolerable nonsense against which genteel taste and
subserviency are afraid to rise, in connection with art, is astounding.
Egg's honest amazement and consternation when he saw some of the most
trumpeted things was what the Americans call 'a caution.' In the very
same hour and minute there were scores of people falling into
conventional raptures with that very poor Apollo, and passing over the
most beautiful little figures and heads in the whole Vatican because
they were not e