ed with the chief command, at the head of his troops,
Magius threw himself into the island of Cyprus, and after a skilful
defence, which could not prevent its fall, at Famagusta he was taken
prisoner by the Turks, and made a slave. His age and infirmities induced
his master, at length, to sell him to some Christian merchants; and
after an absence of several years from his beloved Venice, he suddenly
appeared, to the astonishment and mortification of a party who had never
ceased to calumniate him; while his own noble family were compelled to
preserve an indignant silence, having had no communications with their
lost and enslaved relative. Magius now returned to vindicate his honour,
to reinstate himself in the favour of the senate, and to be restored to
a venerable parent amidst his family; to whom he introduced a fresh
branch, in a youth of seven years old, the child of his misfortunes,
who, born in trouble, and a stranger to domestic endearments, was at one
moment united to a beloved circle of relations.

I shall give a rapid view of some of the pictures of this Venetian
nobleman's life. The whole series has been elaborately drawn up by the
Duke de la Valliere, the celebrated book-collector, who dwells on the
detail with the curiosity of an amateur.[83]

In a rich frontispiece, a Christ is expiring on the cross; Religion,
leaning on a column, contemplates the Divinity, and Hope is not distant
from her. The genealogical tree of the house of Magius, with an
allegorical representation of Venice, its nobility, power, and riches:
the arms of Magius, in which is inserted a view of the Holy Sepulchre of
Jerusalem, of which he was made a knight; his portrait, with a Latin
inscription: "I have passed through arms and the enemy, amidst fire and
water, and the Lord conducted me to a safe asylum, in the year of grace
1571." The portrait of his son, aged seven years, finished with the
greatest beauty, and supposed to have come from the hand of Paul
Veronese; it bears this inscription: "Overcome by violence and artifice,
almost dead before his birth, his mother was at length delivered of him,
full of life, with all the loveliness of infancy; under the divine
protection, his birth was happy, and his life with greater happiness
shall be closed with good fortune."

A plan of the Isle of Cyprus, where Magius commanded, and his first
misfortune happened, his slavery by the Turks.--The painter has
expressed this by an emblem of a tree s