xpressly set up to be worshipped. So in this place. There
are pictures by Tintoretto in Venice, more delightful and masterly than
it is possible sufficiently to express. His Assembly of the Blest I do
believe to be, take it all in all, the most wonderful and charming
picture ever painted. Your guide-book writer, representing the general
swarming of humbugs, rather patronizes Tintoretto as a man of some sort
of merit; and (bound to follow Eustace, Forsyth, and all the rest of
them) directs you, on pain of being broke for want of gentility in
appreciation, to go into ecstacies with things that have neither
imagination, nature, proportion, possibility, nor anything else in them.
You immediately obey, and tell your son to obey. He tells his son, and
he tells his, and so the world gets at three-fourths of its frauds and
miseries."

The last place visited was Turin, where the travellers arrived on the
5th of December, finding it, with a brightly shining sun, intensely cold
and freezing hard. "There are double windows to all the rooms, but the
Alpine air comes down and numbs my feet as I write (in a cap and shawl)
within six feet of the fire." There was yet something better than this
to report of that bracing Alpine air. To Dickens's remarks on the
Sardinian race, and to what he says of the exile of the noblest
Italians, the momentous events of the few following years gave striking
comment; nor could better proof be afforded of the judgment he brought
to the observation of what passed before him. The letter had in all
respects much interest and attractiveness. "This is a remarkably
agreeable place. A beautiful town, prosperous, thriving, growing
prodigiously, as Genoa is; crowded with busy inhabitants; full of noble
streets and squares. The Alps, now covered deep with snow, are close
upon it, and here and there seem almost ready to tumble into the houses.
The contrast this part of Italy presents to the rest, is amazing.
Beautifully made railroads, admirably managed; cheerful, active people;
spirit, energy, life, progress. In Milan, in every street, the noble
palace of some exile is a barrack, and dirty soldiers are lolling out of
the magnificent windows--it seems as if the whole place were being
gradually absorbed into soldiers. In Naples, something like a hundred
thousand troops. 'I knew,' I said to a certain Neapolitan Marchese there
whom I had known before, and who came to see me the night after I
arrived, 'I knew a very re