STREETS, SHOPS, AND COURTYARDS

A NARROW CANAL

A marvellous picture by Titian hangs in the Academy of the Fine Arts. It is considered to be one of his finest pictures—the masterpiece of all his masterpieces—the eye of the peacock, as it were. This picture was neglected for many years, hidden away in an obscure portion of a church, and covered with a thick layer of cobwebs and dust. The custodian had almost forgotten the subject of the picture and the name of the painter. One day a certain Count Cicogna happened to visit the church. Being a great connoisseur and lover of art, he noticed this picture, and could not resist moistening his finger and rubbing it over a portion of the canvas. To his amazement, this portion emerged young and fresh, and as highly coloured as when it left the painter's hands—a picture bearing upon it the unmistakable stamp of Titian's genius! The delight of the Count can be imagined. He suggested to the custodian, with great care and tact, that he would present to the church a bran-new glossy picture, very large, of some religious subject; and mentioned in a casual way that theymight give him the dilapidated old picture as a slight return. This was the Assunta. It was painted for the church of the Frari. Fra Marco Jerman, the head of the convent, ordered it at his own expense. Many a time when the work was in progress he and all the ignorant brethren visited the painter's studio and criticised his picture, grumbling and shaking their heads, and wondering whether it would be good enough to be accepted, whether it would be sneered at when uncovered before all Venice. They undoubtedly thought that they had done a rash thing in engaging him. Think of the agony of Titian, hindered by these ignorant men, being forced to explain elaborately that the figures were not too large, that they must needs be in proportion to the space! It was not until the envoy of the Emperor had seen the picture and declared it to be a masterpiece, offering a large sum of money for its purchase, that the Frari understood its value, and decided that, as the buying and selling of pictures was not in their profession, they had better keep it.

BRIDGE NEAR THE PALAZZO LABIA

Tintoretto painted, according to the popular feeling of his period, for the good of mankind. This we certainly owe to the Renaissance—the desire to benefit mankind, and not only menindividually. Tintoretto felt this strongly. One sees not only the effect of this new era of thought in his work: one sees also human life at the base of it. Tintoretto worked for the good of mankind, and his work throbs with humanity. There was atmosphere, reality, in it. He was, it is true, a pupil of Titian; but it was Michael Angelo whose works had the greatest attraction for him. He loved Angelo's overwhelming power and gigantic force. Tintoretto's pictures seem to possess much of the glowing colour of Titian; but he paid greater attention to chiaroscuro. He seems to have had the power of lowering the tone of a sky to suit his composition of light and shade. His conception of the human form was colossal. His work showed a wide sweep and power. He turned to religion, not because it was a duty, but because it answered the needs of the human heart—because it helped him to forget the mean and sordid side of life, braced him to his work, and consoled him in his days of despair. The Bible was not to him a cut-and-dried document concerning the Christian religion, but a series of beautiful parables pointing to a finer life. Then, Tintoretto asked himself, Why keep to the old forms and the old ideals? Why should the saints and biblical people berepresented as Romans, walking in a Roman background? He himself thought of them as people of his own kind, and painted them as such. Thus, he argued, people became more familiar with the Bible, more readily understood it.

Tintoretto painted portraits not only of Venetians, but also of foreign princes. Although he painted with tremendous rapidity, the demand was greater than the supply. His paintings were popular. They gave pleasure to the eye, and stimulated the emotions. He painted people at their best, in glowing health and full of life. Under his marvellous brush old men became vigorous and full-blooded. His pictures give the same sort of pleasure as one finds in looking upon a casket of jewels—they are just as deathless in their brilliancy. The portrait that the popular taste called forth in Titian's day was just about as unlike the typical modern portrait as you could possibly imagine,—the colourless, cold, unsympathetic portrait of the fish-eyed mayor in his robes.

THE HOUSE WITH THE BLUE DOOR

At the age of fifteen, Jacopo Robusti—tintoretto, the little dyer—was brought by his father, Battista Robusti, to the studio of the great painter Titian. There he stayed for a little while, until one day Titian came across, in his bottega, somedrawings that showed promise. On discovering that they were from the hand of Jacopo, he sent the boy away. Young as he was, Tintoretto had all the arrogance of the well-to-do citizen. He would brook no man's No, and would not yield his own pretensions for the greatest genius in Christendom. He did not need money: he was independent: and he started boldly to teach himself. Boiling with rage at the affront Titian had put upon him, he was determined to make a career for himself. He studied the works of Michael Angelo and of Titian, and inscribed upon his studio wall, so that his ambition might always be before his eyes, "Il desegno di Michael Angelo, e' il colorito di Titiano." He studied casts of ancient marbles, and made designs of them by the light of a lamp, in order to gain a strong effect of shadow. Also, he copied the pictures of Titian. Seeking, by every means in his power, to educate himself, he modelled figures of wax and plaster, upon which he hung his drapery. And always, whether painting by night or by day, he arranged his lights so as to have everything in high relief. Tintoretto's inventions for teaching himself were endless. Often he visited the painters' benches in the piazza of St. Mark's, where the poor men of the professionworked at painting chests and furniture of all kinds. In those days there were too many painters. The profession was overdone. Many young men who had real genius worked at the benches. Titian was the great man at the moment, and Palma Vecchio. But Tintoretto did not care. He forced his work down men's throats—gave it to them for nothing if they would not pay for it. He was always ready with his brush, and would paint anything from an organ to an altar-piece. He worked like a giant, with tremendous sweep and power; no subject was too great or too laborious; and always he had a desire to do his best.

Tintoretto would not be trifled with or condescended to. He would not have his work under-valued, and would allow no patrician, not even a prince, to play the patron to him. He was determined not to be set aside. He flung his pictures at people's heads, and insisted on undertaking any great piece of work there was to do. Thus, Tintoretto's pictures are to be seen everywhere in Venice—in almost every church, every council-hall, every humble chapel, every parish church, every sacristy. He neglected no opportunity to make his work known. He worked with extraordinary rapidity. Whenever Tintoretto came across afine fair wall he prevailed upon the master-mason to allow him to paint it. A fifty-foot space he would cover with avidity, asking nothing for his work but the cost of the material, giving his time and labour as a gift.

CANAL IN GIUDECCA ISLAND

Portraiture was the outcome of realism, and one of the most important discoveries of the Renaissance. People began to feel that they wanted not only their affluence in possessions, but also their own individual faces and features, handed down to posterity. Thus portraiture began to creep in. At first it appeared in the churches under cover of saints and Madonnas; gradually it became possible to distinguish one from another—it was not always the same face. Painters took models from life as their saints. But portraiture in painting was very slow in reaching perfection. Sculpture had accomplished that long before; now that the latest craze was for portraiture, it was the sculptors who were the most prepared to take it up, and stepped forward to execute commissions. They had plenty of material in the way of old Roman coins and busts. Donatello and Vittore Pisano were the two men who first offered to satisfy the new want. Donatello executed marvellous studies of character, and Pisano medals such as have never been seenbefore or since. But even these men, fine as their work undoubtedly was, felt that the public could not long remain satisfied merely with the sculptured portrait. They must have colour. Donatello, therefore, began to stain and colour his busts, showing that painting, not sculpture, was to be the portrait art of the Renaissance. Vittore Pisano also gave up his sculpture, and turned his attention to portrait-painting; but he was only an amateur in this direction, and did not meet with much success. No portrait-painter of any merit was produced in that generation. The idea was entirely new. Men had not had sufficient time in which to study the human face. The next generation ushered in Mantegna, who painted a marvellous portrait of Cardinal Sciramo; but he went too far in the other direction. He painted his man as he was—as he saw him, line for line. He painted the soul and heart of him—and the soul and the heart were black. Venice was revolted with such a portrait. It seemed indeed indecent that a man's character should be laid bare in such a way. It was a picture they did not care to hang in the Council Chamber, a picture that was unpleasant to live with. The Cardinal belonged to the State. His honour was their honour, and it must not bedefiled. The Venetians came to the conclusion that portraits must be painted not in full-face but in profile. Thus the characteristics of a man, if they be not pleasant, do not come out clearly. This accounts for the number of profile portraits. The age wanted an agreeable portrait. This Giorgione provided. He realised that the treatment must always be bright, joyous, romantic. His followers trod in his footsteps: the master's style was too strong and pronounced to be much deviated from. Giorgione seems to have reached the topmost height of art at that period. Even Titian, for a generation after his death, followed in Giorgione's lines; only, Titian's work was a little more sober, a little less sunny. He had the sense to see that Giorgione had expanded the old rule and done something worth adopting, and for a time he simply followed this joyful outburst. His early years fell at a time when life was glowing, radiant, almost intoxicating in its vigour. But youth and joy cannot last; nor could the Renaissance spirit. Gradually the trouble and the strife from which the whole of Italy was suffering filtered into Venice, and cast a serious aspect over art and social life. Venice, of all the states in Italy, was the last to feel this sobering influence.She had been defeated both in battle and in commerce; and, although she was not totally crushed under the heel of Spain, life was not the endless holiday it promised to be. Men took themselves more seriously, and the quieter pleasures of friendship and affection began to be more sought after. Religion revived in importance. Men clung to it, as they always do in time of trouble, for comfort and support. It was no longer a political sentiment, but a personal one. Art declined as the sunshine and the gaiety that had fed and nourished it ebbed away. When men began to feel that individually they were of no avail, that they were subject to the powers round about and above them, the death-blow of great art fell. Titian was influenced by his environment, and his painting changed completely. He produced pictures that would have been looked upon with scorn in his earlier days. The faces of his men are no longer smooth and free from care. One saw there struggle and suffering, and all that life had done for them. But Titian was not a pessimist at heart. The joy and gaiety in which he had been brought up formed part of his character. Whatever changes may have happened to his country politically, nothing could alter that entirely. Andit was no doubt this early training and the atmosphere in which he was brought up that made his pictures the masterpieces they were. You notice the men who came after Titian—how they began to decline. For example, Lorenzo Lotto had been brought up in the heyday of the Renaissance; but the new order of things, the change from national virility to national decadence, enfeebled him. Then, again, the coming in touch with poets and men of letters, victims flying from the fury of Spain, was a new stimulant to art. It did not exactly improve it; but it certainly changed it.

THE ORANGE SAIL

A fine period of painting does not come in a day, nor does it end in a day; and, although the universal interest in the Venetian school dies with Titian and Tintoretto, it does not die unnoticed. The torch of art flickered up many times in Venice before it was finally extinguished. The men who came immediately after Tintoretto had not the strength to start off on any new lines. They simply fell back on variations of the earlier masters, showing much of the masters' weaknesses, but few of their great qualities. Some even were so inartistic as to attempt to pass off their pictures, on ignorant people, as Titians and Giorgiones. However,before the Republic disappeared there were two or three men who took the first rank among the painters of the period, provincial artists, men whose art was sufficiently like her own to be readily understood, such as Paul Veronese. The provinces were not declining so rapidly as Venice was. They were less troubled by the approaching storm. Men there led simple, healthy lives; Spanish manners were long in reaching the provinces, and, when they did, the people were slow to succumb. Men in the provinces had stamina, simplicity, and courage with which to meet the new order of things. They combined ceremony and splendour with childlike naturalness. Consequently, the works of Paul Veronese delighted the Venetians. The more fashionable and ceremonious private life in the city became, the more were the people charmed with his simple rendering.

A QUIET RIO

Gradually the taste of the Venetians turned towards pictures in humble quarters—in the provincial towns and in the country. In the Middle Ages the country was so upset that it was not safe for people to venture out of the city; but with the advance of civilisation this state of affairs was altered. People began to delight in country life. The aristocracy took villas in the provinces, andthe poorer people wanted representations of them in their houses. The painters of the period, Palma and Bonifacio, began to add pastoral backgrounds to their works. But the first great landscape painter was Jacopo Bassano. His treatment of light and atmosphere was masterly, and his colouring was jewel-like and brilliant. It was Bassano who started that great Spanish school which was to culminate in Velasquez. Venice did not produce many great painters in the eighteenth century—only three or four. The city itself remained unchanged: it was just as beautiful, still the most beautiful and luxurious city in the world: it was the people who changed. They became apathetic, placid, and drifting, perfectly contented with one another and with their lots in life, never trying to better themselves in any way. There were no difficulties, no problems to be solved. People were just as gay as they were serious, just as much interested in paintings as they were in politics. This was a vegetable period.

It is strange that such a demoralising time should have seen the rise of a great master; but it certainly saw him in Canaletto. That artist differed from nearly all the Venetian painters in that he had complete mastery of technique. Hiswork is just as fine technically as that of Velasquez or that of Rembrandt. It shows marvellous dexterity and power. He understood his materials better than any other Venetian painter—better even than Giorgione.

Guardi and Tiepolo followed Canaletto. In Tiepolo's work especially you realise the character of these eighteenth-century people. At that time Venice was sliding downhill rapidly. Her people were aping dignity. They dressed extravagantly, not so much for the love of colour and splendour as for swagger. They were degenerating rapidly. Here and there lesser masters appeared; but Venetian art became poorer and poorer, until it reached the condition of the present day, when in Venice there is no art at all. The kind of work which the people appreciate sickens and saddens you—those sunlit photographs glazed with blue to counterfeit moonlight, and tricky, vicious water-colours,—brutal pictures with metallic reflections and cobalt skies,—all wonderfully alike, all with the same orange sail, and all equally untrue.

HUMBLE QUARTERS

Year by year painters continue to paint Venice without the public showing signs of weariness. Perhaps the failure of the artists to reproduce the undying charm of that dazzling jewel of cities isboth the excuse and the reason for the pertinacity of the tribe. Womanlike, she eludes them; manlike, they pursue. Few have seen the real Venice, the Venice of Ruskin and Turner and Whistler. Venice is not for the cold-blooded spectator, for the amateur or the art dabbler: she is for the enthusiastic colourist and painter, the man who sees, and does not merely look.

Sir Edward Burne-Jones was wont to declare that to paint Venice as she should be painted one must needs live for three thousand years: the first thousand should be devoted to experiments in various media; the second to producing works and destroying them; the third to completing slowly the labour of centuries. He would never have dreamed of spending a painting holiday beyond Italy—that is, unless he had been permitted to live for over five thousand years; and even then, it was his firm opinion, no man could paint St. Mark's, which was unpaintable—mere pigment could not suggest it.

RIO DI SAN MARINA

A SQUERO OR BOAT-BUILDING YARD

In the crooked and bewildering streets of Venice, which open out from the great piazza and lead all over the city, one sees the true life of the people. It is there that the poor congregate. The houses teem with humanity. There the true Venetians are harboured. One comes to know them well, and the manner of life they lead; and so gay and light-hearted are they, it is strange if one does not like them in spite of all their faults. Was there ever more irregularity than in the streets of Venice? All the houses seem to be differently constructed. Some are lofty; others are squat; some have balconies and chimney-pieces thrust out into the street so as almost to touch the houses opposite. Nearly every house has at one time been a palace, and each is in a different stage of decay—houses that have once been the homes of merchant princes, palacesin which perhaps even Petrarch may have feasted,—inhabited now by the poorest of Venetians. The weekly wash flutters from the balconies (the linen of Venice is famed for its whiteness), and frowsy heads appear at Gothic windows. Worms have eaten and rust has corrupted everything destructible. Yet now and then one is astonished at the preservation of certain portions of the buildings. In that labyrinth of streets one never knows what surprise may be in store. You will come across beautiful early-Gothic gateways covered with sculptured relief and inlaid designs of leaves; a fourteenth-century palace with the faint remains of the paintings of some artist with which at one time it must have been covered; lovely remnants of crosses let into the walls; Renaissance wells of the sixteenth century; delicately-carved parapets; a great stone angel standing guardian at some calle head; irregularly twisted staircases of the fifteenth century; a Gothic door with terra-cotta mouldings; and churches without number. Some of the finest architectural gems in Europe are here, and almost every house is invested with a strange history. The place seems inexhaustible. As you walk in those old streets the shadows of the mighty dead go with you—those greatmen who lived glorious lives for Venice and for art. There is an old-world atmosphere about the streets. They twist and turn, and sometimes are so narrow that there is scarcely room for two people to pass each other; at times they are so dark and still that the scuttling of a rat into the water makes one start. Venice is full of contrasts, full of the unexpected. It is as if Providence, seeing fit that one's eyes should not become satiated with beauty unalloyed, throws in little marring touches—shocks to your feelings, cold douches of water, as it were—in order to give value to the marvellous colouring and antiquity of the water city. For example, from the world of Desdemona, where one can fancy one sees her lean from a traceried window and catch a distant echo of a mellow voice out on the water singing a serenade, it is rather a shock suddenly to find yourself in the piazza of St. Mark. It is easy to lose oneself in the streets of Venice. In a minute you can step from the past to the present, and find yourself among the marbles of St. Mark's and the arcades of the Ducal Palace—in the tourist's Venice, amid glittering shops full of modern atrocities, mosaic jewellery, wood-carving, imitation glass, and what not—Americans and other globe-trottersstaring up at St. Mark's, laughing and reading their guide-books.

THE WEEKLY WASH

For all artists and lovers of the picturesque the side streets of Venice—calle, as they are called—are fascinating beyond words. Every house has a character peculiarly its own. Each is in a way unique and totally dissimilar to its fellows; each is proud in the possession of relics of architectural beauties. Every street is made up of magnificent palaces and churches, fine examples of architecture in such rich and varied wealth and diversity of styles that one is almost overpowered. There are old Gothic palaces, venerable specimens of Renaissance or Venetian period. Time indeed has laid heavy hands upon them; but it seems to have augmented their charm. This homely aspect of Venice interests. The old houses and the rickety archways appeal to the observer, if he be not too keen of smell. Here are marvellous and varied combinations of rich colouring—weather-worn bricks, grated windows, and brilliant shutters picturesque and shabby by the lapse of time, and shops half lost in gloom. Most of the houses are of distempered rose-colour at the top and moss-green at the bottom. The sun shines on the roof, and the water laps at the base. There are land-gatesand water-gates to most of the houses—one opening upon a canal, the other upon a courtyard.

A BACK STREET

I lived for six months in Venice, and have seen these streets under every possible aspect. I have seen them in the early morning, at mid-day, in the evening, at night, in the rain, in the sun; and I can never decide at what time of the day they appear most fascinating. Perhaps it is after a rain-shower, when every tone upon the old walls is brought out and accentuated—greys and pale sea-greens and the old Venetian red with which so many of the houses used to be distempered. The shops in Venice are very thickly set. Most of them open right down to the ground, and the wares, which are varied, appear to ooze out into the street. Here is a corn-dealer's shop with open sacks of polenta flour of every shade of yellow; there a green-grocer's shop where vegetables are sold—such a wealth of colour in the piles of tomatoes, vegetable marrows, and great pumpkins cut down the middle to display their orange cores. The richer shops, however, are blocked up several feet high, and have latticed windows.

I love to wander through these streets at night, when the squalor and the misery of Venetian life are hidden by the darkness, and one sees onlybeauty. Here are subjects for the etcher, for Rembrandt and Frans Hals,—marvellous effects of light and shade. The streets are pitch-dark; there is nothing to mar the lovely fair blue nights of Venice—no vicious shaft of electric light to bleach the colour from the sky. These side streets are lit by the candle and the lamp. Perhaps the most picturesque of all the shops at night are the wine-shops. There one sees, beneath some low blackened doorway, a rich golden-brown interior. In the midst of this golden gloom one dim oil-lamp is burning—the most perfect light possible from the painter's standpoint: by it, the dark faces and gesticulating hands of the men gathered round a table are turned to deep orange. This is all one sees growing from out the encircling gloom—faces, hands, and a few flecks of ruby light, as the glasses are raised. Every shop down these narrow streets has its shrine to the Virgin Mary, with its statuette, its fringes, and its flowers; and at night these shrines are illuminated according to the poverty or the wealth of the proprietor—some have only a tiny dip, others have a candle or a group of candles, while well-to-do folk boast a row of oil-lamps. Rich or poor, each has its offering, its tiny beacon. The children may gowithout bread, and the mother may lack warm clothing; but the Holy Mother must not be robbed of her due. There is certainly a wonderful simplicity of faith about these people. The cook-shops are fascinating by night. There are innumerable stalls; in fact, nearly all the shopping seems to be done from stalls; even the butchers have open-air stalls. At night chestnut-roasters, toffee-vendors, pumpkin-and-hot-pear men hold full sway. These are generally surrounded by groups of open-mouthed children gazing with delight at the long twisted strings of toffee in the hands of the operator. Almost a still greater attraction to the young folk of Venice is the chestnut-roaster; he generally takes up his position in the courtyards, as does the coffee-roaster. Courtyards seem to be the favourite haunts of the coffee-roasters,—partly, I suppose, because all the doors of the houses round about open into them, and housewives can be easily supplied. They seem to be constantly roasting coffee berries night and day; the whole place reeks with the fragrant odour. They are picturesque by day, these busy workers, but far more picturesque by night, when the gleam of their ovens shows orange in the purple gloom, and the leaping flames light up the faces ofthe children round about, handsome little faces with a certain grandeur in them—boys with bronze cheeks, dark hair, olive complexions, black eyes, and sometimes a touch of colour in their red flannel caps and their multicoloured patches of garments. There is something barbaric and fine and graceful about them, half-encircled, as they are, by the filmy blue smoke from the ovens. A Venetian Good Friday celebrated in a poor and populous part of Venice at night is most picturesque. The people of the quarter—the coffee-roasters, the cook-shop men, the footmen, and the wine-sellers—arrange to sing a chant in twenty-four verses, a grave and sombre chant following the life of our Lord in His Passion. Each verse takes about five minutes to sing, and there is a pause of equal length between each two verses. During every interval the crowd, who have been quiet, begin to chatter, the men smoke, and the boys rush and tumble. Directly the precentor begins, silence falls upon them once more. Most of the people in that particular quarter subscribe to the erection of a shrine with plenty of candles and little glass lamps. It is a picturesque sight—the yellow light from the altar lamps falling on the group of men and women gathered round thesingers and the many heads thrust out of windows and balconies, on the fair, devout, and serious faces of the children, on the handsome women and the bronze-faced men.

All the world in Venice lives out of doors: they breakfast and lunch and dine, all in the open air. All of them live in lodgings or hotels, and principally in the bedrooms, which are for the most part comfortless and dreary,—their only merits are a frescoed ceiling, sometimes really fine and old, and a balcony. One can procure a marvel of a palace in Venice for the cost of a garret in London. There is no real home-life in Venice. Rich and poor, mothers, fathers, children, and servants,—all take their food in the open air. There are restaurants and cafés for the well-to-do, endless eating-houses for the poorer classes, and sausage-makers for the gondoliers. Cookshops swarm. There you see great piles of fish and garlic, bowls of broth, polenta, and stewed snails, roast apples, boiled beans, cabbages, and potatoes. Every holiday, every saint's day, has its special dish. Carnival time sets the fashion for beaten cream or panamonlata; at San Martino gingerbread soldiers are popular; and for Christmas time there is candy made with honey and almonds. A certain broth consumed bythe very humblest is made from scraps of meat which even the sausage-makers will not use: as may be imagined, the soup is highly flavoured. In the midst of all these stalls and eating-houses it is extraordinary how little there is eaten in Venice,—merely a mouthful here and there,—a kind of light running meal. A Venetian, no matter how rich he might be, would never dream of inviting you to a set meal. There is no heavy food, no cut from the joint. If a Venetian invites you to an entertainment, he will give you a cup of coffee perhaps, or a glass of wine and a biscuit,—rarely more. He will never invite you to eat a great meal; he never takes it himself. The eating-house and the stall appear to be more or less of an excuse for gossip and the meeting of neighbours.

If the streets of Venice are bewitching by night, they are certainly delightful in the early morning. It is then that one receives the most vivid impressions. There is a certain freshness in one's perceptions at the dawn. The poor wretches who make their beds in the streets, or on the steps, or at the base of columns, shake themselves and shamble off. Troops of ragged "facchini" fill the streets, and quarrel noisily over their work. The great cisterns in the market-place are open, and the water isbrought round to your house by dealers, stout young girls with broad backs and rosy cheeks; they carry it in two brass buckets attached to a pole, and empty it into large earthenware pots placed ready for its reception in the kitchen. These girls, called "bigolanti," supply the place of water-works. At this hour you see the shops opening like so many flowers before the sun. Butchers set forth their meat; fruit shops, crockery shops, bakers', cheap-clothing, and felt-hat shops, show their various wares. You see peasants at work among vegetables, building cabbages and carrots into picturesque piles, and decorating them with garlic and onions, while their masters are still sleeping on sacks of potatoes. Great barges arrive from Mestre, Chioggia, and Torcello, laden with vegetables and fruit. Eating-houses begin their trade. You see men and women taking their breakfast, and a savoury smell of spaghettis and eels on gridirons fills the air. Gondoliers begin to wash their gondolas, brush their felces, polish the iron of their prows, shake their cushions, and put everything in order for business. Picturesque old women, carrying milk in fat squat bottles, make the round of the hotels and restaurants at this early hour. They are good to look at, with their dark nut-brownfaces and dangling gold earrings under their large straw hats. Their figures are much the shape of their bottles; and they bring a pleasant atmosphere into Venice, an atmosphere of fields and clover-scented earth, and milk drawn from the cream-coloured cows. Fishermen, a handsome class, with weather-beaten faces, in blue clothing, come striding down the calle, shallow baskets of fish on their heads. They set up their stalls and display their soles and mackerel, chopping up their eels into sections and crying, "Beautiful, and all alive!" At this hour everyone is making bargains, and the result is a continual buzz; but there is nothing discordant about the street cries of Venice. A peculiarly beautiful cry is that of the man who comes round every morning with wood for your kitchen fire. The fuel-men cut their wood on the shores of the Adriatic, and anchor their barges at the Custom House, leaving them in charge of mongrel yellow dogs, who guard so vigilantly and are so extremely aggressive that never a splinter is taken from the barges.

THE WOODEN SPOON SELLER

The street cries are full of individuality, and the tradesman brings a little art to bear on the description of his wares. The song of the sweep, exquisitely sad, quite befits the warning, "Bewareof your chimney!" There is nothing gay about the sweep: he is a very melancholy person, and his expression is in sympathy with his music. The pumpkin-vendor is coy, and his cry has a winning pathos; his is not an easy vegetable to launch on the market, and he has developed into a very bashful person. His cry is cooing and subtle: he almost caresses you into buying, which is necessary, as no one in his right senses really desires a pumpkin. The fruiterer is different. He is handsome, fat-cheeked, and has scarlet lips, strong black hair curling in ringlets, and gold rings in his ears. His adjuration is a round, full, resonant roar, like a triumphant hymn; and there is altogether a certain Oriental splendour about his demeanour. It is not necessary for him to be subtle: there is always a sale for melons and pears, chestnuts and pomegranates. He uses colour as a stimulant to his customers, and dwells upon the hue of his fruit. "Melons with hearts of fire!" he cries. Also he flatters. To a dear old gentleman passing by he will hold up a clump of melons, some of them sliced, or a group of richly coloured pomegranates, and say, "Now, you as a man of taste will appreciate this marvellous colour; you are young enough to understand the fire and beautyof these melons"; and the old gentleman will go on his way feeling quite pleased and youthful. Some of the cries are quaint. I once heard a man say, "Juicy pears that bathe your beard!" and another said his peaches were "ugly but good,"—they certainly were not beautiful to look upon. Almost the most melodious salesmen are the countrymen who pace the streets with larks and finches in cages, and roses and pinks in pots.

At mid-day the streets are enveloped in a warm golden light; there are rich old browns, orange yellows, and burnt siennas—all the tints of a gorgeous wall-flower. A ray of sun in a bric-à-brac shop attracts your attention; and you get a peep through a window with cobwebbed panes, high up in a flesh-coloured wall, at some of the objects within,—brass pots and pans gleam from the walls, bits of china and porcelain, strings of glass beads, some quaint old bookcases with saints carved in ivory, fragments of old brocade woven with gold and gorgeous,—all kinds of strange curiosities, looking crisp and brilliant in the sunlight. Suddenly you are blinded by a patch of golden yellow. It is an orange-stall placed before a pink palace flecked with the delicate tracery of luminous violet shadow. Away down in the interior of the stall, where thesun does not shine, it appears almost purple by contrast to the brilliant mass of golden fruit. The background of all these shops is neutral: the objects for sale form the only brilliant and positive colour.

The palaces and houses are mostly pink and white. There are pinks, and greys, and blues, and so on. It is not the painted, coloured city that one had imagined it to be: Venice is very grey. But its greyness is that of the opal and the pearl. I have often heard people say how strange it is that the colours always seem brighter in Venice than in any other city—the shutters and the doors and the shops. The answer is not far to seek. It is because the background and the general colouring is neutral. There are no large patches of positive colour: even St. Mark's, choke-full of colour as it is, has no positive colour in its composition. Take a peep into a carpenter's shop. Through the iron grating, rusty and red with age, you see the quaint old craftsman at work, his flesh tone very much the colour of the wood he is planing; piercing black eyes look through and over the large bone-framed glasses that he wears; he suggests the carpenter of Japan; and, judging from the amount of shavings you see about thefloor, you gather that he is a dignified, not what may be called a feverish, worker. He is, however, evidently an artist: you see dainty specimens of wood-carving hung round on the walls. Most of the carpenters of Venice seem to be old men. There appear to be very few middle-aged people at all. They seem to be either young boys and girls or ancient men and women. Whether it is that Venetians age quickly, I do not know. The old women are extraordinary. You can scarcely imagine how anything so crooked and foul and old and frowsy, with so little hair, so few teeth, so many protruding bones, and such parchment-like skin, can be human. Their faces seem to be shrunken like old fruit: I have seen women with noses shrivelled and with dents in them like strawberries. It is extraordinary to watch these women on their shopping excursions. How they bargain! They think nothing of starting the day before to buy a piece of steak, and sometimes spend a whole day haggling over it. Some of the shopmen are swindlers,—fat, greasy men, very fresh and brisk, who have reduced cheating to a fine art.

WORK GIRLS

It is only after living in Venice for some months that one begins to understand the bargaining in the streets. You will see two men talking—onethe shopman, the other the purchaser—and if you know anything of the language, and watch carefully, you will find it the most marvellous bit of acting imaginable. They bargain; the customer turns in scorn, and goes; he is called back; the goods are displayed once more, and their merits expatiated upon. The customer laughs incredulously and moves away. The seller then tries other tactics to fog his client. Eventually he makes a low offer, which is accepted; but even then the shopman gets the best of it, for he has a whole battery of the arts of measurement in reserve. There is really no end to the various possibilities of "doing" a man out of a halfpenny.

Beggars are a great trial in the streets. The lame, the halt, and the blind breathe woe and pestilence under your window, and long monotonous whines of sorrow. Fat friars in spectacles and bare feet come round once a month begging bread and fuel for the convents. Old troubadours serenade you with zithers, strumming feebly with fingers that seem to be all bone, and in thin quavering voices pipe out old ditties of youth and love.

There are lottery offices everywhere. Around them there is always a great excitement. Themissing number, printed on a card framed in flowers and ribands, is placed in the windows daily. Some say that the system of lottery should be done away with; but it might be cruel to deprive the poor wretches of hope. The lottery brings joy to many despairing people.

Venetian women are good-looking. One sees them continually about the streets. Nothing can surpass the grace of the shawl-clad figures seen down the perspective of the long streets, or about some old stone well in a campiello. They are for the most part smart and clean. You see them coming home from the factories, nearly always dressed in black, simple and well-behaved. Their hair is of a crisp black, and well tended; their manner is sedate and demure. There is no boisterousness about the Venetian girls, no turning round in the streets, no coarseness. Many of them are very beautiful. You see a woman crossing an open space with the sunlight gleaming on the amber beads about her throat and making the rich colour glow brighter beneath her olive skin. A shawl is thrown round her shoulders, and her jet-black hair is fastened by a silver pin. She wears a deep crimson bodice. The choice of colour of these women is unerring in taste. Their shawls areseldom gaudy, generally of blue or pale mauve; vivid colours are reserved for the bodices.

Then, there are the bead-stringers. You see them everywhere: handsome girls with a richness of southern colour flushing beneath warm-toned skins, eyes large and dark, with heavy black lashes, the hair twisted in knots low on their necks, and swept back in large waves from square foreheads, a string of coloured beads round their necks, and flowered linen blouses with open collars. You see them with their wooden trays full of beads. The bead-stringers are nearly always gay. They laugh and chat as they run the beads on the strings. They often form a very pretty picture, as they bend over their work and thread turquoise beads from wooden trays.

In the courtyards, some women are hanging white clothes on a line before a yellow wall; others are leaning out of their windows, gossiping with neighbours. Never was there a more gossiping set of women: every window, every balcony, seems to be thronged with heads thrust out to chatter.

Venice is divided up into campi or squares. Each campo has a church, a butcher, a baker, a candlestick-maker, and everything else that is necessary to life, including a café and a market.

Venetian children, as a rule, are very badly reared, and many of them die at an early age. It is a belief and a consolation that the little ones go straight to heaven, there to plead their parents' cause and to arrange for their reception.

May is the best month in which to see the streets. The intoxication of spring is in the air, and in the bright sunlight the colours burn and glow. Although you cannot see them, you are constantly reminded that there are gardens in Venice. Suddenly over the red brickwork of a high wall you will see clumps of tamarisk, hanging mauve wisteria, or the scarlet buds of a pomegranate, while the scent of syringa and banksia roses fills the air, the birds sing in the enclosure, and the perfume of honeysuckle trails over the wall of a garden of a foreign prince. Few crowds are more cheerful or better ordered than a Venetian crowd. There is a light-heartedness about these people that is very engaging; they have a marvellous frankness of manner, a sublime indifference to truth. The smallest Venetian child is a born flatterer, and will tell you, not what he thinks, but what he imagines you wish to hear. The people are the most engaging in the world, free from care or doubt as to right or wrong.This carelessness is characteristic of the whole Italian race. Venetians give the impression of being always determined to enjoy life to the full. They are continually coming together, for the purpose of pleasure, on one pretence or another, and the flashes of wit in the street are sometimes very amusing. The Venetians have always been, and still are, a great festa-loving people. When the Republic fell, the brave ceremonies came to an end; but the original passion is still kept alive. The festa in Venice are chiefly of religious character. For example, once a year each parish church honours the feast of its patron saint by processions to all shrines within that particular parish. Very picturesque are the streams of priests and people crossing the bridges and passing along the fondanta of some small canal,—a brilliant ribbon of vermilion and gold winding through the grey-toned city: porters of the church (in blouses of white, red, and blue) bearing candles, pictures, and banners; bands playing the gayest operatic tunes; priests and the parocco carrying the Host under a canopy of cloth of gold; long files of the devout holding candles; and boys with crackers and guns. At night there is dancing in the largest campo of the parish. On Good Friday the streets resemblea feast rather than a fast. The people are in their best and gaudiest clothes; children are rushing and romping and turning somersaults, whirling their rattles, fitting up shrines and then appealing to the crowd for coppers,—human mites of six or seven constructing "Santo Sepolcro," or Holy Graves, from old bottles, sprigs of bay stuck in, and odd candle-ends. One may witness touches of sentiment in a Venetian crowd; but the depths are seldom stirred. Sometimes sentiment finds expression in the rilotti—popular Venetian songs.

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