s room.
The Great Council Chamber was used for the first time on the day when
Foscari entered the Senate as Doge,--the 3rd of April, 1423, according
to the Caroldo Chronicle;[132] the 23rd, which is probably correct, by
an anonymous MS., No. 60, in the Correr Museum;[133]--and, the following
year, on the 27th of March, the first hammer was lifted up against the
old palace of Ziani.[134]

Sec. XXV. That hammer stroke was the first act of the period properly
called the "Renaissance." It was the knell of the architecture of
Venice,--and of Venice herself.

The central epoch of her life was past; the decay had already begun: I
dated its commencement above (Ch. I. Vol. 1.) from the death of
Mocenigo. A year had not yet elapsed since that great Doge had been
called to his account: his patriotism, always sincere, had been in this
instance mistaken; in his zeal for the honor of future Venice, he had
forgotten what was due to the Venice of long ago. A thousand palaces
might be built upon her burdened islands, but none of them could take
the place, or recall the memory, of that which was first built upon her
unfrequented shore. It fell; and, as if it had been the talisman of her
fortunes, the city never flourished again.

Sec. XXVI. I have no intention of following out, in their intricate
details, the operations which were begun under Foscari and continued
under succeeding Doges till the palace assumed its present form, for I
am not in this work concerned, except by occasional reference, with the
architecture of the fifteenth century: but the main facts are the
following. The palace of Ziani was destroyed; the existing facade to the
Piazzetta built, so as both to continue and to resemble, in most
particulars, the work of the Great Council Chamber. It was carried back
from the Sea as far as the Judgment angle; beyond which is the Porta
della Carta, begun in 1439, and finished in two years, under the Doge
Foscari;[135] the interior buildings connected with it were added by the
Doge Christopher Moro (the Othello of Shakspeare)[136] in 1462.

Sec. XXVII. By reference to the figure the reader will see that we have
now gone the round of the palace, and that the new work of 1462 was close
upon the first piece of the Gothic palace, the _new_ Council Chamber of
1301. Some remnants of the Ziani Palace were perhaps still left between
the two extremities of the Gothic Palace; or, as is more probable, the
last stones of it may have been s