INTRODUCTION xxvii

manuscripts, books, documents, and adorned with paintings and engravings and a hundred pieces of minor art and curiosity.”¹

This description of Rawdon Brown is enough to show how congenial a spirit Ruskin must have found in him, but Ruskin was further attracted to him-as to another Venetian friend and antiquary, Edward Cheney²-by a certain unlikeness also. “They [Rawdon Brown and Cheney] are both as good-natured as can be,” he writes to his father (October 11, 1851), “but of a different species from me-men of the world, caring for very little about anything but Men.”

But if Rawdon Brown’s interest was in men, it was in the famous of old times as well as in the present, and Brown had his romance among the stones of Venice as interesting and curious as any of Ruskin’s own. He had first gone to Venice, as already related (Vol. IX. p. 420 n.), to find the burial-place of Mowbray, Shakespeare’s “Banished Norfolk.” The Venetian antiquaries could give him no help, and he got access to the State archives. Mowbray had been honourably interred, he found, within the precincts of St. Mark’s, and in 1533, one hundred and thirty-four years after his death, his bones were removed to his native land. But where was the precise place of burial, and where the monument that marked his grave? The search was for a long while unsuccessful, but it was the cause of Brown’s subsequent interest in the general history of Venice. At last he chanced upon a book written by a Frenchman at Venice in 1682. It contained a plate of arms, representing a sculptured marble on the outer wall of the Ducal Palace on the sea-façade. The author interpreted the heraldic devices as symbols of the majesty and sovereignty of Venice. Brown at once recognised them as of English origin, and it flashed across him that this might have been the monumental slab for which he had so long been searching. He showed the plate to various masons in vain, but at last one of them recognised it. “I have a good right,” he said, “to know it. I almost lost my life for it.” When the French

¹ Professor C. E. Norton’s article on “Rawdon Brown and the Gravestone of ‘Banished Norfolk,’” in The Atlantic Monthly, June 1889, vol. 63, p. 741. The house described by Professor Norton is that in which Rawdon Brown died. The English ambassador, Sir Henry Wotton, once lived in it. It is now called the Casa Grimani, and is occupied by “The Venice Art Company”; it is attributed to Sanmichele. Brown had previously inhabited two other houses: (1) the Casa Pacchiarotti, a house which no longer exists, having been absorbed in the new buildings of the Hotel d’Italie: this he shared for a time with Edward Cheney; (2) the Casa Businello, where he was living when Ruskin was at Venice in 1851-1852: see below, p. 453. The Casa Dario also at one time belonged to Rawdon Brown (see in the next volume, Appendix 4), but he did not reside in it.

² We shall meet Cheney again; see, especially, the appendix to Ruskin’s Guide to the Academy at Venice.

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