INTRODUCTION xxix

to write in; we have this and a kind of hall dining-room, a beautiful drawing-room, double bed-room and dressing-room, three servants’ rooms and kitchen, on the Grand Canal, with south aspect, nearly opposite the Salute; and on first floor, for about 17 pounds a month...”¹

“Turner’s ‘Grand Canal’ engraved from Munro’s picture ... will give you a perfect idea of the place where we are, our house being just out of the picture on the left-hand side of it, and looking across the Grand Canal to the Salute steps. ... The evening yesterday after dinner with red moon resting behind Salute was inexpressibly delightful.”

“I am now settled more quietly, (he writes again,) than I have ever been since I was at college, and it certainly will be nobody’s fault but my own if I do not write well; besides that, I have St. Mark’s Library open to me, and Mr. Cheney’s, who has just at this moment sent his servant through a tremendous thunderstorm with two books which help me in something I was looking for. I have a lovely view from my windows, and temptation to exercise every day, and excellent food, so I think you may make yourself easy about me. ... For the first time in my life, I feel to be living really in my own house. For I never lived at any place that I loved before and have been either enduring the locality or putting up with somewhat rough habitation.” (Letters to his father, September 7, 11, 18, 24).

The “temptation to exercise” seems to have been well used. Temptation there was also to social distractions, and to these Ruskin sometimes yielded, though perhaps with less readiness. Venice under the Austrian domination was a centre of much fashionable and military society, and Ruskin’s letters home during this winter tell of many and brilliant gaieties. He and his wife went everywhere and saw everybody who was anybody. Many notabilities of the day figure in Ruskin’s accounts of their tea-parties or other re-unions. Thus we meet not only the Austrian

¹ Ruskin had “George” with him as factotum; his wife had a maid. George was employed among other things in taking Daguerreotypes and as copyist. He also maintained his reputation as a humourist (cf. Vol. IV. p. xxiv. n.). With some difficulty they had a grate with a coal fire fitted up in their apartments: “There were still tongs, poker and shovel wanting to an establishment, which Mr. Brown raked up out of his stores and sent us, and we had a nice scene at the first lighting of the fire; for our gondolier servant, Beppo, had never seen one, and did not believe that coals would burn; and Bastian (Mr. Brown’s servant), who came with the fire-irons, thought it necessary to instruct George that the poker ‘was to break the coals with,’ on which George immediately asked him in a humble manner the use of the tongs; which Bastian having also explained with great gravity, George proceeded to inquire that of the shovel; but there Bastian found him out, and appeared for a moment disposed to let him feel the weight of all the three. It was quite a little bit of Moličre” (November 25, 1851).

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