is vessel so
long as the enemy's fleet is uncaptured, thirty families, apothecaries,
grocers, vintners, tanners admitted among the nobles, a bravery, a
public spirit like that of Athens under Themistocles and of Rome under
Fabius Cunctator. If, from this time forth, the inward fire abates we
still feel its warmth for many long years, longer kept up than in the
rest of Italy, and sometimes demonstrating its power by sudden
outbursts.

The nobles, on their side, are always ready to fight. During the whole
of the sixteenth century, even up to the seventeenth and beyond, we see
them in Dalmatia, in the Morea, over the entire Mediterranean, defending
the soil inch by inch against the infidels. The garrison of Famagouste
yields only to famine, and its governor, Bragadino, burned alive, is a
hero of ancient days. At the battle of Lepanto the Venetians alone
furnish one half of the Christian fleet. Thus on all sides, and
notwithstanding their gradual decline, peril, energy, love of country,
all, in brief, which constitutes or sustains the grand life of the soul
here subsists, while throughout the peninsula foreign dominion, clerical
oppression and voluptuous or academical inertia reduces man to the
system of the antechamber, the subtleties of dilettantism and the babble
of sonnets.

But if the human spring is not broken at Venice, it is seen insensibly
losing its elasticity. The government, changed into a suspicious
despotism, elects a Mocenigo doge, a shameless speculator profiting on
the public distress, instead of that Charles Zeno who had saved the
country; it holds Zeno prisoner two years and entrusts the armies on the
mainland to condottieri; it is tied up in the hands of three
inquisitors, provokes accusations, practises secret executions and
commands the people to confine themselves to indulgences of pleasure. On
the other hand luxury arises. About the year 1400 the houses "were quite
small;" but a thousand nobles were enumerated in Venice possessing from
four to seventy thousand ducats rental, while three thousand ducats were
sufficient to purchase a palace.

Henceforth this great wealth is no longer to be employed in enterprises
and in self-devotion, but in pomp and magnificence. In 1495, Commine
admires "the grand canal, the most beautiful street, I think, in the
world, and with the best houses; the houses are very grand, high and of
excellent stone--and these have been built within a century. All have
fronts of