l Palace, that history in stone; the
Rialto, with the babble of many languages; the Piazza, with its flock of
fearless pigeons; the Brazen Horses, the Winged Lion, the Bucentaur, all
that the artists of Venice did to make her beautiful, her ambassadors to
make her wise, her secret tribunals to make her terrible; memories of
these things must come thronging upon the mind at the mere mention of
her spell-like name. Now, with these pictures glowing vividly before
you, wrench the mind away with sudden effort to the dreary plains of
Pannonia. Think of the moody Tartar, sitting in his log-hut, surrounded
by his barbarous guests; of Zercon, gabbling his uncouth mixture of
Hunnish and Latin; of the bath-man of Onegesh, and the wool-work of
Kreka, and the reed candles in the village of Bleda's widow; and say if
cause and effect were ever more strangely meted in history than the rude
and brutal might of Attila with the stately and gorgeous and subtle
republic of Venice.

One more consideration is suggested to us by that which was the noblest
part of the work of Venice, the struggle which she maintained for
centuries, really in behalf of all Europe, against the Turk. Attila's
power was soon to pass away, but, in the ages that were to come, another
Turanian race was to arise, as brutal as the Huns, but with their
fierceness sharp-pointed and hardened into a far more fearful weapon of
offence by the fanaticism of Islam. These descendants of the kinsfolk of
Attila were the Ottomans, and but for the barrier which, like their own
_murazzi_ against the waves, the Venetians interposed against the
Ottomans, it is scarcely too much to say that half Europe would have
undergone the misery of subjection to the organized anarchy of the
Turkish pachas. The Tartar Attila, when he gave up Aquileia and her
neighbor cities to the tender mercies of his myrmidons, little thought
that he was but the instrument in an unseen Hand for hammering out the
shield which should one day defend Europe from Tartar robbers such as he
was. The Turanian poison secreted the future antidote to itself, and the
name of that antidote was Venice.

JOHN RUSKIN

In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which
distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that toil
was rewarded, partly by the power of deliberate survey of the countries
through which the journey lay, and partly by the happiness of the
evening hours, when, from the top of th