lers 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, 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.

"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
characterizing 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 motive of action
ceases to be praiseworthy. With the fulness of this spirit the
prosperity of the state is exactly correspondent, and with its failure
her decline, and that with a closeness and precision which it will be
one of the collateral objects of the following essay to demonstrate from
such accidental evidence as the field of its inquiry presents. And, thus
far, all is natural and simple. But the stopping short of this religious
faith when it appears likely to influence national action,
correspondent as it is, and that most strikingly, with several
characteristics of the temper of our present English legislature, is a
subject, morally and politically, of the most curious interest and
complicated difficulty; one, however, which the range of my present
inquiry will not permit me to approach, and for the treatment of which I
must be content to furnish materials in the light I may be able to throw
upon the