III. CUMÆ 295

Venice on my arrival struck me with horror rather than pleasure.”¹

After this, she goes to the Casini, and is happy. It does not appear she had ever read the Merchant or Othello; still less has Evelyn read them,² though for him, as for Sidney, Othello’s and Antonio’s Venice was still all but living. My Venice, like Turner’s, had been chiefly created for us by Byron; but for me, there was also still the pure childish passion of pleasure in seeing boats float in clear water. The beginning of everything was in seeing the gondola-beak come actually inside the door at Danieli’s, when the tide was up, and the water two feet deep at the foot of the stairs; and then, all along the canal sides, actual marble walls rising out of the salt sea, with hosts of little brown crabs on them, and Titians inside.

56. Between May 6th and 16th I made notes on effects of light,³ afterwards greatly useful in Modern Painters; and two pencil drawings, Ca’ Contarini Fasan, and the Giant’s Staircase,⁴ of which, with two more made at Bologna in passing, and some half-dozen at Naples and Amalfi,⁵ I can

¹ [Really in 1785 (November 18): see p. 93 of A Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople, in a Series of Letters from the Right Hon. Elizabeth, Lady Craven: 1789. Gibbon’s description of Venice (1765), given in Vol. X. p. xlix., may be compared.]

² [For Evelyn’s visit to Venice, 1645-1646, see the Diary for June and July 1645.]

³ [Presumably, coloured notes in his sketch-book; but there are also descriptive notes in his diary.]

⁴ [These drawings are reproduced on Plate 2 in Vol. III. (p. 212), and Plate 2 in Vol. IV. (p. 40).]

⁵ [The drawing of Amalfi is here reproduced (Plate XVI.). The note on Amalfi in his diary is as follows:-

“(NAPLES, March 11.)-Saw no more of Amalfi than I sketched, but that was glorious. Far above all I ever hoped when I first leaped off the mule in the burning sun of the afternoon, with the light behind the mountains, the evening mist doubling their height. I never saw anything in its way at all comparable. Moonlight on the terrace before the inn. Very full of feeling, smooth sea and white convent above; with the keen shadows of the rocks far above, and the sea dashing all bright in my ears, low but impatiently and quick. I never heard waves follow each other so fast. They must have been very small, but sound swelling on the night air. Morning lovely again and quite mild. I sat very happily on the stone wall at the edge of the beach sketching till the sun got too intense for my eyes.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]