seen Tintoretto's monster picture, which is seventy-four feet long and I

do not know how many feet high, and thought it a very commodious picture.

We have seen pictures of martyrs enough, and saints enough, to regenerate

the world. I ought not to confess it, but still, since one has no

opportunity in America to acquire a critical judgment in art, and since I

could not hope to become educated in it in Europe in a few short weeks, I

may therefore as well acknowledge with such apologies as may be due, that

to me it seemed that when I had seen one of these martyrs I had seen them

all. They all have a marked family resemblance to each other, they dress

alike, in coarse monkish robes and sandals, they are all bald headed,

they all stand in about the same attitude, and without exception they are

gazing heavenward with countenances which the Ainsworths, the Mortons

and

the Williamses, et fils, inform me are full of "expression." To me there

is nothing tangible about these imaginary portraits, nothing that I can

grasp and take a living interest in. If great Titian had only been

gifted with prophecy, and had skipped a martyr, and gone over to England

and painted a portrait of Shakspeare, even as a youth, which we could all

have confidence in now, the world down to the latest generations would

have forgiven him the lost martyr in the rescued seer. I think posterity

could have spared one more martyr for the sake of a great historical

picture of Titian's time and painted by his brush--such as Columbus

returning in chains from the discovery of a world, for instance. The old

masters did paint some Venetian historical pictures, and these we did not

tire of looking at, notwithstanding representations of the formal

introduction of defunct doges to the Virgin Mary in regions beyond the

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The Innocents Abroad