d. In
it we see a man of genius with a passion for the best and most sincere
work devoting every gift of appraisement, exposition, and eulogy,
fortified by the most loving thoroughness and patience, to the glory of
the city's architecture, character, and art.

The first church is that of the Gesuati, but it is uninteresting.
Passing on, we come shortly to a very attractive house with an
overhanging first floor, most delectable windows and a wistaria, beside
a bridge; and looking up the canal, the Rio di S. Trovaso, we see one of
the favourite subjects of artists in Venice--the huddled wooden sheds of
a squero, or a boat-building yard; and as likely as not some workmen
will be firing the bottom of an old gondola preliminary to painting her
afresh. Venice can show you artists at work by the score, on every fine
day, but there is no spot more certain in which to find one than this
bridge. It was here that I once overheard two of these searchers for
beauty comparing notes on the day's fortune. "The bore is," said one,
"that everything is so good that one can never begin."

Of the myriad artists who have painted Venice, Turner is the most
wonderful. Her influence on him cannot be stated in words: after his
first residence in Venice, in the early eighteen-thirties, when he was
nearing sixty, his whole genius became etherealized and a golden mist
seems to have swum for ever before his eyes. For many years after that,
whenever he took up his brush, his first thought was to record yet
another Venetian memory. In the Tate Gallery and the National Gallery
are many of the canvases to which this worshipper of light endeavoured
with such persistence and zeal to transfer some of the actual glory of
the universe: each one the arena of the unequal struggle between pigment
and atmosphere. But if Turner failed, as every artist must fail, to
recapture all, his failures are always magnificent.

There are, of course, also numbers of his Venetian water-colours.

Where Turner lived when in Venice, I have not been able to discover; but
I feel sure it was not at Danieli's, where Bonington was lodging on his
memorable sojourn there about 1825. Turner was too frugal for that. The
Tate has a brilliant oil rendering of the Doges' Palace by Bonington.
The many Venetian water-colours which he made with such rapidity and
power are scattered. One at any rate is in the Louvre, a masterly
drawing of the Colleoni statue.

To enumerate the great artist