to the house of Giustiniani--a house too princely and too
important to Venice to be suffered to tolerate any sympathy with Rome.
Giustinian the elder, being pronounced in his patriotic partizanship,
had replaced the ambassador to his Most Catholic Majesty of Spain, whose
attempts at conciliation were so ludicrously inadequate that a court of
less astute diplomacy than Venice might have been tempted to withdraw
its embassy. Spain and Venice had been stepping through a stately dance,
as it were, decorous and princely,--though scarcely misleading,--an
interminable round of bows and dignified advances leading no whither,
since for a forward step there was a corresponding backward motion to
complete the _chasse_, and all in that gracious circle which flatters
the actor and the onlooker with a pleasurable sense of progress; but the
suspense as to the issue of this minuet was all on the side of Spain,
and Venice had patience to spare for these pretty time-filling paces
which presented such semblance of careless ease to the watching
embassies. England, with an understanding quickened by her own
experience, took a serious interest in the quarrel. But his Most
Christian Majesty of France was foremost among the princes in efforts to
hasten the conciliation of the disputants, and when Henry of France
offered to mediate between the powers, Venice said him not nay. For if
she would take no personal step toward conciliation, she yet held no
code by which the intercession of a monarch might seem to lessen her
dignity; and the coming of so princely an envoy as the Cardinal di
Gioiosa was celebrated with fetes meet to grace the reception of so high
a dignitary of the Church of Rome.

Hence Venice, under the ban, suggested rather a lively tourney in some
field of cloth of gold, than an excommunicated nation in its time of
mourning; there were frequent interchanges of diplomatic
courtesies--receptions to special embassies which had lost nothing of
their punctilious splendor. There had always been time in Venice for
absolute decorum, and now there was not less than usual, since her
conduct had been denounced--though Venice and her prestige were
untarnished and the world was looking on!

Marcantonio, in spite of his deep home anxiety, was becoming more and
more absorbed in the affairs of a government which made such claims upon
him, and for the honor of his house, by all Venetian tradition, he must
give to the full that which was exacted o