84 THE STONES OF VENICE

Between that grim cathedral of England and this, what an interval! There is a type of it in the very birds that haunt them; for, instead of the restless crowd, hoarse-voiced and sable-winged, drifting on the bleak upper air, the St. Mark’s porches are full of doves, that nestle among the marble foliage, and mingle the soft iridescence of their living plumes, changing at every motion, with the tints, hardly less lovely, that have stood unchanged for seven hundred years.

§ 15. And what effect has this splendour on those who pass beneath it? You may walk from sunrise to sunset, to and fro, before the gateway of St. Mark’s, and you will not see an eye lifted to it, nor a countenance brightened by it. Priest and layman, soldier and civilian, rich and poor, pass by it alike regardlessly. Up to the very recesses of the porches, the meanest tradesmen of the city push their counters; nay, the foundations of its pillars are themselves the seats-not “of them that sell doves”¹ for sacrifice, but of the vendors of toys and caricatures. Round the whole square in front of the church there is almost a continuous line of cafés, where the idle Venetians of the middle classes lounge, and read empty journals; in its centre the Austrian bands play during the time of vespers, their martial music jarring with the organ notes,-the march drowning the miserere, and the sullen crowd thickening round them,-a crowd, which, if it had its will, would stiletto every soldier that pipes to it.² And in the recesses of the porches, all day long, knots of men of the lowest classes, unemployed and listless, lie basking in the sun like lizards; and unregarded children,-every heavy glance of their young eyes full of desperation and stony depravity, and their throats hoarse with cursing,-gamble, and fight, and snarl, and sleep, hour

refers to this passage and partly revises it. He confirms the comparison to “the tossed spray of sea waves,” but says that they were not “meant to be like sea-foam white in anger, but like light spray in morning sunshine. They were all overlaid with gold”-as may be seen in Gentile Bellini’s picture in the Academy. The comparison, it may be noted, was not a mere piece of “word painting”; Ruskin adopted it “believing then, as I do still, that the Venetians ... were always influenced in their choice of guiding lines of sculpture by their sense of the action of wind or sea.”]

¹ [Matthew xxi. 12; John ii. 16.]

² [On the Austrian occupation of Venice, see in the next volume, Appendix 3.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]