ed with
illegitimate ambition, and that, for every instance in which private
passion sought its gratification through public danger, there are a
thousand in which it was sacrificed to the public advantage. Venice may
well call upon us to note with reverence, that of all the towers which
are still seen rising like a branchless forest from her islands, there
is but one whose office was other than that of summoning to prayer, and
that one was a watchtower only: from first to last, while the palaces of
the other cities of Italy were lifted into sullen fortitudes of rampart,
and fringed with forked battlements for the javelin and the bow, the
sands of Venice never sank under the weight of a war tower, and her roof
terraces were wreathed with Arabian imagery, of golden globes suspended
on the leaves of lilies.

"These, then, appear to me to be the points of chief general interest in
the character and fate of the Venetian people. I would next endeavor to
give the reader some idea of the manner in which the testimony of art
bears upon these questions, and of the aspect which the arts themselves
assume when they are regarded in their true connection with the history
of the state: 1st. Receive the witness of painting. It will be
remembered that I put the commencement of the Fall of Venice as far back
as 1418. Now, John Bellini was born in 1423, and Titian in 1480. John
Bellini, and his brother Gentile, two years older than he, close the
line of the sacred painters of Venice. But the most solemn spirit of
religious faith animates their works to the last. There is no religion
in any work of Titian's: there is not even the smallest evidence of
religious temper or sympathies either in himself or in those for whom he
painted. His larger sacred subjects are merely themes for the exhibition
of pictorial rhetoric,--composition and color. His minor works are
generally made subordinate to purposes of portraiture. The Madonna in
the church of the Frari is a mere lay figure, introduced to form a link
of connection between the portraits of various members of the Pesaro
family who surround her. Now this is not merely because John Bellini was
a religious man and Titian was not. Titian and Bellini are each true
representatives of the school of painters contemporary with them; and
the difference in their artistic feeling is a consequence not so much of
difference in their own natural characters as in their early education:
Bellini was brought up