EPILOGUE 233

to be true when I wrote them, and thought it good for the reader to be informed of that truth, namely, that Byron did not know the date of the Bridge of Sighs, nor of the Colleone statue;¹ and that his feelings about Venice had been founded on an extremely narrow acquaintance with her history. I did not think it at all necessary for the public to know that, in spite of all my carefully collected knowledge, I still felt exactly as Byron did, in every particular; or that I had formed my own precious “style” by perpetual reading of him, and imitation of him in various alliterative and despairing poems, of which the best, the beginning of a Venetian tragedy written when I was sixteen, has by good luck never seen the light;² but another, a doggerel in imitation of the Giaour, got me favour in the eyes of Mr. Smith, the publisher of Friendship’s Offering, and made my unwise friends radiantly happy in the thought that I should certainly be a poet, and as exquisitely miserable at the first praises of then clear-dawning Tennyson.

§ 3. Nor, again, did I think it would at all advance the acquaintance of my readers with the principles of Venetian Gothic or Venetian policy, to be told that for the love of Byron, I had run the risk of a fever in drawing the undercanal vaults, and the desolate and mud-buried portico of the ruined Casa Foscari.³

Whether it would have been more becoming in me to tell them this, or to taunt the ignorance of one who had taught me so much in points which for his own work were useless to him, and at the time he wrote, unregarded by anybody else, may be extremely questioned; but I did not at that time consult, nor have I much since consulted, becomingness; vanity, always much,-love, more,-and the truth of the matter in hand, beyond all things. Which has brought about the consequences aforesaid; namely, that vain

¹ [See Vol. X. p. 8.]

² [“Marcolini”: see now Vol. II. p. 474. The “doggerel in imitation of the Giaour” is “Leoni”; see Vol. I. p. 289.]

³ [Ruskin meant rather the Rio de Ca’ Foscari house, drawn in the Examples, Plates 8, 9, 10.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]