Fighting with frosty winds at every turn of the canals takes away all the old feelings of peace and stillness; the protracted cold makes the dash of the water on the walls a sound of simple discomfort, and some wild and dark day in February one starts to find oneself actually balancing in one's mind the relative advantages of land and water carriage, comparing the Canal with Piccadilly, and even hesitating whether for the rest of one's life one would rather have a gondola within call or a hansom." He then goes on to lament the decay of Venice, the idleness and dissipation of the populace, the lottery gambling; and to forebode the "destruction of old buildings and erection of new" changing the place "into a modern town--a bad imitation of Paris." Better than that he thinks would be utter neglect; St.Mark's Place would again be, what it was in the early ages, a green field, and the front of the Ducal Palace and the marble shafts of St.Mark's would be rooted in wild violets and wreathed with vines: "She will be beautiful again then, and I could almost 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.