EPILOGUE 235

steamers which came to unload coals on the quay. The effort made to do thoughtful work in spite of their noise was, I doubt not, in great part the cause of my first illness;¹ and if the reader cares indeed to see a little of my true personality, let him buy the numbers of Fors written in Venice in the winter of 1876.* Which for several more serious reasons he had better do.

I will not encumber his travelling trunk with reprint of more than a single sentence of them here; but these contain quite final statements respecting the history of Venice, and particulars in the legends of St. Ursula and St. Theodore, which will be found of material use in the examination of Carpaccio’s paintings, and their contemporary sculpture. These earlier and perfectly finished works will be found of much more interest and use by the general visitor if intelligent and attentive, than the pictures of the more renowned Venetian masters, always impetuous and often slight, to which attention is principally directed in the casual notices of this book, and in its terminal index.

§ 4. If, however, in my later books, I have spoken less of the acknowledged heads of the Venetian school, it is not because I love or reverence them less; but only that I have learned also to estimate more humble labourers,² and have seen that it was useless to insist, for the ordinary traveller, on the technical merits of the highest examples in an art he had never practised, and on the most imaginative and majestic renderings of legends he had never read.

When you yourself, good reader, first show a natural history book to a child, you must tell it primarily, “That’s a goose,” “That’s a duck,” “That’s a tomtit,” etc.

Well, suppose I take you up to Tintoret’s Paradise, and tell you in the same instructive manner,-That’s a Saint, that’s a Father, that’s a Potestas. But you never saw a

* Letters 71 to 77.

¹ [By “my first illness” Ruskin refers not to that at Matlock in 1871, but to his first attack of inflammation of the brain in the early part of 1878.]

² [So in the MS. Previous editions have misread “Labours.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]