§ 1. With the words which closed the last chapter virtually ended the book which I called The Stones of Venice,—meaning, the history of Venice so far as it was written in her ruins: the city itself being even then, in my eyes, dead, in the sense of the death of Jerusalem, when yet her people could love her, dead, and say, “Thy servants think upon her stones, and it pitieth them to see her in the dust.”

And her history, so far as it was thus in her desolation graven, is indeed in this book, told truly, and, I find on re-reading it, so clearly, that it greatly amazes me at this date to reflect how no one has ever believed a word I said, though the public have from the first done me the honour to praise my manner of saying it; and, as far as they found the things I spoke of amusing to themselves, they have deigned for a couple of days or so to look at them,—helped always through the tedium of the business by due quantity of ices at Florian's, music by moonlight on the Grand Canal, paper lamps, and the English papers and magazines at M. Ongania's with such illumination as those New Lamps contain — Lunar or Gaseous, enabling pursy Britannia to compare, at her ease, her own culminating and co-operate Prosperity and Virtue with the past wickedness and present out-of-pocketness of the umquhile Queen of the Sea.