t wish that the
time might come quickly, were it not that so many noble pictures
must be destroyed first.... I love Venetian pictures more and more,
and wonder at them every day with greater wonder; compared with all
other paintings they are so easy, so instinctive, so natural;
everything that the men of other schools did by rule and called
composition, done here by instinct and only called truth.

"I don't know when I have envied anybody more than I did the other
day the directors and clerks of the Zecca. There they sit at inky
deal desks, counting out rolls of money, and curiously weighing the
irregular and battered coinage of which Venice boasts; and just
over their heads, occupying the place which in a London
countinghouse would be occupied by a commercial almanack, a
glorious Bonifazio--'Solomon and the Queen of Sheba'; and in a less
honourable corner three _old_ directors of the Zecca, very
mercantile-looking men indeed, counting money also, like the living
ones, only a little _more_ living, painted by Tintoret; not to
speak of the scattered Palma Vecchios, and a lovely Benedetto Diana
which no one ever looks at. I wonder when the European mind will
again awake to the great fact that a noble picture was not painted
to be _hung_, but to be _seen_? I only saw these by accident,
having been detained in Venice by soma obliging person who
abstracted some [of his wife's jewels] and brought me thereby into
various relations with the respectable body of people who live at
the wrong end of the Bridge of Sighs--the police, whom, in spite of
traditions of terror, I would very willingly have changed for some
of those their predecessors whom you have honoured by a note in the
'Italy.' The present police appear to act on exactly contrary
principles; yours found the purse and banished the loser; these
_don't_ find the jewels, and won't let me go away. I am afraid no
punishment is appointed in Venetian law for people who steal
_time_."

Mr. Ruskin returned to England in July, 1852, and settled next door to
his old home on Herne Hill. He said he could not live any more in Park
Street, with a dead brick wall opposite his windows. And so, under the
roof where he wrote the first volume of "Modern Painters," he finished
"Stones of Venice." These latter volumes give an account of St