Excerpt from The Stones of Venice, Vol. 1 A Good many years ago now, wandering about Italy, I found myself, almost by accident, in Venice. My intention was to stay a week only, but it happened that during that time I somehow found out my way to a public library, which was situated in an old palace on one of the back canals near S. Maria Formosa, and here, among the few English books, I discovered, and for the first time made acquaintance with, Ruskin's "Stones of Venice." The book engrossed me immediately. Every night until the closing of the library I sat up filling notebooks with definitions and descriptions, or with diagrams of arches and capitals, and all day I rowed from church to church and palace to palace, comparing, examining, and from time to time adding certain profound reflections of my own to the ideas with which Ruskin had supplied me. The immediate result of all this was that from a week my stay lengthened to three months, but the more important one was that, in this way, through the instrumentality of this book, there was unlocked for me a source of interest which grew into one of the most engrossing occupations and studies of my life, an incentive to many journeys and a chief clue and help to the understanding of history. And although by and by many of Ruskin's judgements came to me to seem untenable, and I let them go, yet this in no way affected or lessened the interest which he had revealed in the subject, and which continued steadily to grow and increase. My reason for recalling this personal incident here is that it seems to me a good illustration of Ruskin's general influence. Most people have felt the attraction of that peculiar and vital fascination with which he invested the study of art, and most people, too, have learnt ultimately to question pretty freely his decisions and judgements, and to doubt whether his enthusiastic and emotional manner of adopting theories that were pleasing to him was calculated to stand the test of disinterested examination. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.