its last."

So early he had taken up and wrapped round him the mantle of Cassandra.

But he was suddenly to find the sincerity of Ghirlandajo and the
religious significance of Angelico united with the matured power of art.
Without knowing what they were to meet, Harding and he found themselves
one day in the Scuola di S. Rocco, and face to face with Tintoret.

It was the fashion earlier, and it has been the fashion since, to
undervalue Tintoret. He is not pious enough for the purists, nor
decorative enough for the Pre-Raphaelites. The ruin or the restoration
of almost all his pictures makes it impossible for the ordinary amateur
to judge them; they need reconstruction in the mind's eye, and that is a
dangerous process. Ruskin himself, as he grew older, found more interest
in the playful industry of Carpaccio than in the laborious games, the
stupendous Titan feats of Tintoret. But at this moment, solemnized
before the problems of life, he found these problems hinted in the
mystic symbolism of the School of S. Rocco; with eyes now opened to
pre-Reformation Christianity, he found its completed outcome in
Tintoret's interpretation of the life of Christ and the types of the Old
Testament; fresh from the stormy grandeur of the St. Gothard, he found
the lurid skies and looming giants of the Visitation, or the Baptism, or
the Crucifixion, re-echoing the subjects of Turner as "deep answering to
deep"; and, with Harding of the Broad Brush, he recognised the mastery
of landscape execution in the Flight into Egypt, and the St. Mary in the
Desert.

He devoted the rest of his time chiefly to cataloguing and copying
Tintoret. The catalogue appeared in "Stones of Venice," which was
suggested by this visit, and begun by some sketches of architectural
detail, and the acquisition of daguerreotypes--a new invention which
delighted him immensely, as it had delighted Turner, with trustworthy
records of detail which sometimes eluded even his industry and accuracy.

At last his friends were gone; and, left alone, he overworked himself,
as usual, before leaving Venice with crammed portfolios and
closely-written notebooks. At Padua he was stopped by a fever; all
through France he was pursued by what, from his account, appears to have
been some form of diphtheria, averted only, as he believed, in direct
answer to earnest prayer. At last his eventful pilgrimage was ended, and
he was restored to his home and his parents. It was not long before