IV. ST. THEODORE THE CHAIR-SELLER 251

meet to offer him periodical prayer and alms. This architecture is, seriously, the best you can think of; those angels are handsome, according to your notions of personality; their attitudes really are such as you suppose to be indicative of celestial rapture,-their features, of celestial disposition.

55. We will see what change another fifty years will bring about in these faded feelings of Venetian soul.

The little calle on your right,¹ as you front St. Theodore, will bring you straight to the quay below the Rialto, where you gondola shall be waiting, to take you as far as the bridge over the Cannareggio under the Palazzo Labia.² Stay your gondola before passing under it, and look carefully at the sculptured ornaments of the arch, and then at the correspondent ones on the other side.

In these you see the last manner of sculpture, executed by Venetian artists, according to the mind of Venice, for her own pride and pleasure. Much she has done since, of art-work, to sell to strangers, executed as she thinks will please the stranger best. But of art produced for her own joy and in her own honour, this is a chosen example of the last!

Not representing saintly persons, you see; nor angels in attitudes of admiration. Quite other personages than angelic, and with expressions of anything rather than affection or respect for aught of good, in earth or heaven. Such were the last imaginations of her polluted heart, before death. She had it no more in her power to conceive any other. “Behold thy last gods,”-the Fates compel her thus to gaze, and perish.

56. This last stage of her intellectual death precedes her political one by about a century; during the last half of which, however, she did little more than lay foundations of walls which she could not complete. Virtually, we may close her national history with the seventeenth century; we shall not ourselves follow it even so far.

¹ [Now enlarged and called the Via Mazzini.]

² [The Ponte delle Guglie, rebuilt in 1688.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]