with a view to induce the republic to acknowledge Cromwell by the despatch of a special envoy, than with any idea of their actual fulfilment. Giavarina's residence in London was not more pleasant than it was profitable. He found himself in difficulties on account of the asylum and shelter which he gave at the residency to twenty Catholic priests, whom the Spanish ambassador had left behind him when he was recalled. Giavarina was still further embarrassed by the superior place assigned to the legate of Brandenburg at court ceremonies. He considered it his duty to absent himself on this ground from the festivities attending the confirmation of Richard Cromwell as Protector. The Senate, however, disapproved his conduct, and even proposed to recall him from his post. Nor were these the only troubles which Giavarina had to endure. The Senate paid him very poorly and very irregularly; the expenses of the residency were heavy; he found himself overwhelmed with debt; and, to put a crown to his misfortunes, on the night of the 18th of October, 1657, the residency was broken into by twelve thieves, who bound and beat the resident, and, as he says himself, "robbed me of everything, even my hat; the public ciphers and despatches alone escaping by a miracle."

But better days were in store for Giavarina. The Protectorate fell, the Stuarts were restored, and the Venetian resident had the honour to be the first foreign representative to welcome Charles at Canterbury the day after his landing in England.

VENICE OF TO-DAY.

So much has been written, and is being written daily, about Venice from the picturesque point of view, that one is tempted to cry "Enough," to declare that the subject is exhausted for the present. Such, however, is not the case. For some reasons, which we will presently try to indicate, the fascination which the sea-girt city exercises over her devotees is inexhaustible. The lover returns to the contemplation of his mistress with ardour ever new; he resumes the endless task of cataloguing her charms, only to find that having said all, he has not said half enough. The truth is that we must number Venice among the "cities of the soul;" she ranks with Oxford, Rome, Siena, Prague; she has the fatal gift to touch the imagination, to awaken a permanent desire. Of course I do not mean that every one feels thus about Venice. I cannot forget, when the floods of 1882 had destroyed the exits from the city, that row of discontented Englishmen who lined the hall of one hotel, cursing the place and glowering at the porter as though he were responsible for the downpour on the Alps. For these the language of the Venice-lover must seem as the crackling of thorns under the pot, like sheer moon

madness; but they are always at liberty to keep away, to read nothing that bears the name of Venice, not so much as to have heard whether there be a Venice

or no.

Perhaps the æsthetic quality which most emphatically belongs to the Venetian landscape, the quality wherein resides the secret of her charm, is infinite variety. As a proof of this assertion, I would adduce the fact that no one is quite satisfied with what others write or say about the city, is not satisfied with what he says himself; something is said, but not all—part of the truth, but not the whole truth. The aspects of Venice are as various, as manifold as the hues held in solution upon her waters beneath a scirocco sky. There is a perpetual miracle of change; one day is not like another, one hour varies from the next; there is no stable outline, such as one finds among the mountains, no permanent vista, as in a view across a plain. The two great constituents of the Venetian landscape, the sea and the sky, are precisely the two features in nature which undergo most incessant change. The cloud-wreaths of this evening's sunset will never be repeated again; the bold and buttressed piles of those cloud-mountains will never be built again just so for us; the grain of orange and crimson that stains the water before our prow, we cannot be sure that we shall look upon its like again. The revolution of the seasons will, no doubt, repeat certain effects: spring will chill the waters to a cold, hard green; summer will spread its breadth of golden light on palace front and water-way; autumn will come with its pearly grey scirocco days, and sunsets flaming

with a myriad hues; the stars of a cloudless winter night, the whole vast dome of heaven, will be reflected in the mirror of the still lagoon. But in spite of this general order of the seasons, one day is less like another day in Venice than anywhere else; the lagoon wears a different aspect each morning when you rise, the sky offers a varied composition of cloud each evening as the sun sets. Words cannot describe Venice, nor brush portray her ever-fleeting, evervarying charm. At most they can give one mood that Venice creates, one aspect of the light and colour upon her palace walls and water streets. Venice is to be felt, not reproduced; to live there is to live a poem, to be daily surfeited with a wealth of beauty enough to madden an artist with despair at its ungraspability; and hence it may be that Venice has had so few adequate portrayers among the thousands who have essayed the task, and not a single poet, if we except Shelley, who better than any one else has, incidentally in "Julian and Maddolo," caught and expressed the general spirit of the lagoon landscape; and Mr. Pinkerton, who has seized another of the more prominent qualities of that landscape, the allpervading, sad, caressing grey, characteristic of the lagoons in scirocco weather, and has translated this. quality into its corresponding mood of mind with a touch at once so true and delicate, that I know not where to look for a more faithful portrayal of this emotion.

It is remarkable that the most frequent efforts to express the feeling of Venice in words, should have been cast in prose and not in verse, and should be the

work of foreigners, not of Venetians. George Sand, Ruskin, Théophile Gautier, all strangers over whom has been thrown the spell of the siren, who, leaving her, have borne away with them an incurable wound, for which the only solace has been to dwell again in memory with the features of the beloved, and to reproduce her lineaments on the mirror of the mind. The Venetians love their Venice, but they do not write about her; they live with her, and that is enough. With painters, on the other hand, the case is different; though here again we feel that the artists have given us a part of Venice, not the whole, a quality of light or of colour, one aspect of her infinitely various beauty. Although the great Venetian masters are chiefly concerned with the external life of their city, her pomp and circumstance, incidentally we find them influenced to the very depths of their art by the æsthetic qualities of their native place. The dome-like spaces which Bellini leaves above his throned Madonnas' heads, recall the infinite sweep of the vast Venetian sky; nowhere in painting do we feel, as we feel in Tintoret, that shimmer of light, that blending of tones which belong to the waters of the lagoon; nowhere are the flaming glories of the sunset sky more vividly reproduced than in the triumphant splendours of Titian's canvases. Turner perceived the diffusion and blending of light and colour which we note as a principal feature in the Venetian landscape, and strove to reproduce it in the radiant morning light of "Returning from the Ball," and in the marvellous blending of colour in sky, sail, and sea, in "The Sun of Venice." Turner came near to grasping the spirit of Venetian land