in her hastiest councils; her worldly spirit recovers the ascendency
whenever she has time to calculate the probabilities of advantage, or
when they are sufficiently distinct to need no calculation; and the
entire subjection of private piety to national policy is not only
remarkable throughout the almost endless series of treacheries and
tyrannies by which her empire was enlarged and maintained, but
symbolised by a very singular circumstance in the building of the city
itself. I am aware of no other city of Europe in which its cathedral was
not the principal feature. But the principal church in Venice was the
chapel attached to the palace of her prince, and called the "Chiesa
Ducale." The patriarchal church,[11] inconsiderable in size and mean in
decoration, stands on the outermost islet of the Venetian group, and its
name, as well as its site, is probably unknown to the greater number of
travellers passing hastily through the city. Nor is it less worthy of
remark, that the two most important temples of Venice, next to the ducal
chapel, owe their size and magnificence, not to national effort, but to
the energy of the Franciscan and Dominican monks, supported by the vast
organization of those great societies on the mainland of Italy, and
countenanced by the most pious, and perhaps also, in his generation, the
most wise, of all the princes of Venice,[12] who now rests beneath the
roof of one of those very temples, and whose life is not satirized by
the images of the Virtues which a Tuscan sculptor has placed around his
tomb.

Sec. X. There are, therefore, two strange and solemn lights in which we
have to regard almost every scene in the fitful history of the Rivo
Alto. We find, on the one hand, a deep and constant tone of individual
religion characterising the lives of the citizens of Venice in her
greatness; we find this spirit influencing them in all the familiar and
immediate concerns of life, giving a peculiar dignity to the conduct
even of their commercial transactions, and confessed by them with a
simplicity of faith that may well put to shame the hesitation with which
a man of the world at present admits (even if it be so in reality) that
religious feeling has any influence over the minor branches of his
conduct. And we find as the natural consequence of all this, a healthy
serenity of mind and energy of will expressed in all their actions, and
a habit of heroism which never fails them, even when the immediate
mo