294 ST. MARK’S REST

lugubrious delectation; pleasure difficult enough to imagine, but real and pure, I doubt not; even passionate. In as quite singularly incomprehensible fidelity of sentiment, my cousin’s¹ least baby has fallen in love with a wooden spoon; Paul not more devoted to Virginia.² The two are inseparable all about the house, vainly the unimaginative bystanders endeavouring to perceive, for their part, any amiableness in the spoon. But baby thrives in his pacific attachment,-nay, is under the most perfect moral control, pliant as a reed, under the slightest threat of being parted from his spoon. And I am assured that the crescent Venetian imagination did indeed find pleasantness in these figures; more especially,-which is notable-in the extreme emaciation of them,-a type of beauty kept in their hearts down to the Vivarini days;³ afterwards rapidly changing to a very opposite ideal indeed.

111. Nor even in its most ascetic power, disturbing these conceptions of what was fitting and fair in their own persons, or as a nation of fishermen. They have left us, happily, a picture of themselves, at their greatest time-unnoticed, so far as I can read, by any of their historians, but left for poor little me to discover-and that by chance-like the inscription on St. James’s of the Rialto.⁴

But before going on to see this, look behind you where you stand, at the mosaic on the west wall of the south transept.

It is not Byzantine, but rude thirteenth-century, and fortunately left, being the representation of an event of some import to Venice, the recovery of the lost body of St. Mark.⁵

You may find the story told, with proudly polished, or

¹ [Mrs. Arthur Severn.]

² [For other references to St. Pierre’s romance, see Vol. III. p. 597, and Præterita, ii. § 210.]

³ [Compare above, p. 151.]

⁴ [See above, p. 236, and below, p. 308.]

⁵ [In the reign of the Doge Vitale Falier, “the sepulchre of S. Mark, whose body had been brought to Venice in the reign of Agnello Particiaco, was no longer known. The great fire in the reign of Candiano IV., and the continual alteration of the Basilica, had completely obliterated all traces of the saint’s resting-place.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]