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BY ORDER OF THE CZAR. 247

most romantic days of the world's strange life, full of heroic passages of human history, gay with love ditties, red with tragic story, ramping with war and blatant with defiant trumpets. And oh ! how poor the modern lay of the Ve- netian glories, how dim the words that burned, how inter- mittent the thoughts that breathed when Venice has been the theme. Byron, Otway, Musset, George Sand, how flat in comparison with the reality, ran Philip's thoughts ; how wise that American writer, Howells, who did not strive to describe the indescribable, but wrote a book of thoughts and facts and impressions ; for Venice is a fact ; it was a dream to Philip, though he fully realized that it was a fact it and its palaces, its Doges, its great wars, its rebellions, its Bridge of Sighs and its historic Rialto, its pageants and its pictures, its San Marco of the grand old ancient days, and its Florians of the frivolous present. " But who shall paint it ? " he thought, " and why has the poetic Ruskin tried to catalogue and set forth the details of its beauties as if it were a pile of architectural bric-a-brac ? "

There was one thing Philip resolved and that was, not to paint Venice. The queen of cities, she was to be sug- gested, not painted ; she was an Undine not to be limned as an anatomical study but to be indicated, to be dreamed ; the very thought of Canaletti's pictures of her serene beauty made him shudder ; but he felt that Turner had understood the city in the lagoons with her sinking sun, her shimmery waters, her white and golden towers, her lazy sailing boats, lumbering in from the sea. Philip was hardly responsible for what he felt or thought. If he had eaten the insane root that takes the reason prisoner, he could not have felt more unlike himself, nor could he have been happier in his dreamy helplessness. In the shadow of a great steamer from the Eastern sea flying the flags of England and the P. and O. they pulled up at the stairs of the hotel ; and on their left, like a great white ghost, was