III. ST. JAMES OF THE DEEP STREAM 235

prayers, she had found out long before our English wiseacre apothecaries’ apprentices, were of no use to get either money or new houses with, at a pinch like this. And there was really nothing for it but doing the thing cheap,-since it had to be done. Fra Giocondo of Verona offered her a fair design; but the city could not afford it. Had to take Scarpagnino’s make-shift instead;-and with his help, and Sansovino’s, between 1520 and 1550, she just managed to botch up-what you see surround the square, of architectural stateliness for her mercantile home. Discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, the main cause of these sorrowful circumstances of hers,-observe, sagacious historians.¹

At all events, I have no doubt the walls were painted red, with some medallions, or other cheap decoration, under the cornices, enough to make the little square look comfortable. Whitewashed and squalid now-it may be left, for this time, without more note of it, as we turn to the little church.*

35. Your Murray tells you it was built “in its present form” in 1194, and “rebuilt in 1531, but precisely in the old form,” and that it “has a fine brick campanile.”² The fine brick campanile, visible if you look behind you, on the other side of the street, belongs to the church of St. John Elemosinario. And the statement that the church was “rebuilt in precisely the old form” must also be received with allowances. For the “campanile” here is in the most orthodox English Jacobite style of the seventeenth century, the portico in Venetian fifteenth, the walls are in no style at all, and the little Madonna inserted in the middle of them is an exquisitely finished piece of the finest work of 1320 to 1350.

* Do not, if you will trust me, at this time let your guide take you to look at the Gobbo di Rialto, or otherwise interfere with your immediate business.

¹ [Compare a letter from Venice of February 10, 1877, included in Arrows of the Chace, 1880, vol. ii. p. 214, and reprinted in a later volume of this edition.]

² [At p. 358 of the edition of 1874. The passage is revised in the later editions.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]