arate body. This first period includes the Rise of Venice, her
noblest achievements, and the circumstances which determined her
character and position among European powers; and within its range, as
might have been anticipated, we find the names of all her hero
princes,--of Pietro Urseolo, Ordalafo Falier, Domenico Michieli,
Sebastiano Ziani, and Enrico Dandolo.

"The second period opens with a hundred and twenty years, the most
eventful in the career of Venice--the central struggle of her
life--stained with her darkest crime, the murder of Carrara--disturbed
by her most dangerous internal sedition, the conspiracy of
Falier--oppressed by her most fatal war, the war of Chiozza--and
distinguished by the glory of her two noblest citizens (for in this
period the heroism of her citizens replaces that of her monarchs),
Vittor Pisani and Carlo Zeno. I date the commencement of the Fall of
Venice from the death of Carlo Zeno, 8th May, 1418; the _visible_
commencement from that of another of her noblest and wisest children,
the Doge Tomaso Mocenigo, who expired five years later. The reign of
Foscari followed, gloomy with pestilence and war; a war in which large
acquisitions of territory were made by subtle or fortunate policy in
Lombardy, and disgrace, significant as irreparable, sustained in the
battles on the Po at Cremona, and in the marshes at Caravaggio. In 1454,
Venice, the first of the states of Christendom, humiliated herself to
the Turk: in the same year was established the Inquisition of State, and
from this period her government takes the perfidious and mysterious form
under which it is usually conceived. In 1477, the great Turkish invasion
spread terror to the shores of the lagoons; and in 1508, the league of
Cambrai marks the period usually assigned as the commencement of the
decline of the Venetian power; the commercial prosperity of Venice in
the close of the fifteenth century blinding her historians to the
previous evidence of the diminution of her internal strength.

"Now there is apparently a significative coincidence between the
establishment of the aristocratic and oligarchical powers, and the
diminution of the prosperity of the state. But this is the very question
at issue; and it appears to me quite undetermined by any historian, or
determined by each in accordance with his own prejudices. It is a triple
question: first, whether the oligarchy established by the efforts of
individual ambition was the cause,