solemn in their expression; confessing the power, and accepting the
peace, of death, openly and joyfully; and in all their symbols marking
that the hope of resurrection lay only in Christ's righteousness; signed
always with this simple utterance of the dead, "I will lay me down in
peace, and take my rest; for it is thou, Lord, only that makest me dwell
in safety." But the tombs of the later ages are a ghastly struggle of
mean pride and miserable terror: the one mustering the statues of the
Virtues about the tomb, disguising the sarcophagus with delicate
sculpture, polishing the false periods of the elaborate epitaph, and
filling with strained animation the features of the portrait statue; and
the other summoning underneath, out of the niche or from behind the
curtain, the frowning skull, or scythed skeleton, or some other more
terrible image of the enemy in whose defiance the whiteness of the
sepulchre had been set to shine above the whiteness of the ashes.

Sec. XLVII. This change in the feeling with which sepulchral monuments
were designed, from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries, has been
common to the whole of Europe. But, as Venice is in other respects the
centre of the Renaissance system, so also she exhibits this change in
the manner of the sepulchral monument under circumstances peculiarly
calculated to teach us its true character. For the severe guard which,
in earlier times, she put upon every tendency to personal pomp and
ambition, renders the tombs of her ancient monarchs as remarkable for
modesty and simplicity as for their religious feeling; so that, in this
respect, they are separated by a considerable interval from the more
costly monuments erected at the same periods to the kings or nobles of
other European states. In later times, on the other hand, as the piety
of the Venetians diminished, their pride overleaped all limits, and the
tombs which in recent epochs, were erected for men who had lived only to
impoverish or disgrace the state, were as much more magnificent than
those contemporaneously erected for the nobles of Europe, as the
monuments for the great Doges had been humbler. When, in addition to
this, we reflect that the art of sculpture, considered as expressive of
emotion, was at a low ebb in Venice in the twelfth century, and that in
the seventeenth she took the lead in Italy in luxurious work, we shall
at once see the chain of examples through which the change of feeling is
expressed, m