The information of an official character given yesterday in your columns confirms remarkably that which we received a month ago from our correspondent at Venice. The fact that the works had been taken out of the hands of the local authorities and that a Commission was to be called to consider in what way they were to be carried further, while it made us anxious lest those works should be of a yet more sweeping character than what had hitherto been done, yet seemed to afford an opportunity of urging the opinion that the exercise of the utmost conservatism was needed if St. Marks's was not to be practically destroyed by well-meant efforts to restore it.

That opinion we still think is worth the consideration of the Commission now sitting, especially since it has been supported by the large and influential body of cultivated people that has signed the memorial preparing for presentation to the Minister of Public Instruction in Italy, the signatures to which comprise, we believe, the names of the greater part of all those whose study of the subject and interest in it give them the best right to have an opinion thereon.

Letter to the Times, 29 November 1879.