couples thus united, it is a curious sign that they were never from jealousy. There was not love enough for that. The home was not a Venetian institution.

Altogether we are assured that the time devoted by a lady to her looking-glass was at least seven hours a day, the rest of her leisure being filled up with frivolity and pleasure. This is not a pleasing picture of the 'private life' of the more respectable Venetian woman. But who shall throw a stone? Without education or occupation, without outward respect, out-rivalled in opportunities of pleasing by the large class of her countrywomen who kept their corrupt court outside, she was ready to put her faith in raw veal, or in any other medium supposed to enhance her powers of pleasing.

As to those other ladies to whom we have just alluded, a specimen of their manners at the theatre supplies a key to the manners of the time, and to the taste of the gentlemen whom it was their ambition to please. Placed by them in the boxes at a vantage, their chief amusement was to take aim at the hats or heads of the 'popolani' in the pit below; pelting them alternately with candles' ends they had purposely brought with them, and with a certain moist battery from their own lips.

It has been questioned, by Hazlitt and others, whether the socalled liberty of the Venetians was altogether what we understand by that sacred term. Compared with the arbitrary rule of the neighbouring States, it was doubtless an advance. There was a certain safeguard in the fixity of their laws, and in the numbers who combined to make them. Still, the laws thus made permitted of no free action for the individual within them. There is no word which needs such strict definition as that of Liberty. History shows, that it is a thing which cannot be bestowed by the grace and favour of any one man; nor administered by any one class; that it must grow with the growth, and strengthen with the strength, of a whole people; that it has to be gradually and delicately adjusted, in its practical working, to that exact point of the social compass, where the liberty of the one is compatible with that of the whole community, and vice versa; and that, finally, only its possession can teach its use. Sismondi, at the end of his great work, dwells on the fact that Liberty, in the English sense, which, as the protection of the peace, security, and domestic independence of all, of whatever grade, from the abuse of power,' he admits to be the only sense, never existed in the Italian Republics; and least of all in a State where the individual was nothing, and an hereditary caste everything. The privileges of which the Venetians were proud

were

were not in the interests of liberty, but in the accident of birth. That was not liberty where a man could not honestly marry whom he pleased, nor trade where he pleased, nor give his daughter the dowry he pleased; but where the marriage of a noble with a woman of inferior rank, unless the daughter of a glass-blower, or a manufacturer of gold and silver stuffs, who had usually a good dowry, disqualified their sons from a seat in the Gran Consiglio:' and where the captain of a merchantvessel had to be elected and appointed by the government, and the course he was to take and the ports he was to visit were prescribed to him. That these restrictions did not really interfere with his liberty to acquire wealth and to seek adventure is obvious; but it was different with that later petty tyranny, which meddled with the freedom of the individual or private family. Where even the table and the toilet are dictated by law, no nation can learn to be free and no individual to be responsible.

Next to these sumptuary laws in significance are the inventories of some Venetian palaces. We do not profess to know the average amount of silver accumulated in great old English families, but the 23,419 ounces belonging to the Palazzo Mocenigo, in 1771, about fifty years before its occupation by Lord Byron, the interval having consummated the ruin of Venice, seems a large figure. Of silver plates alone of different sorts and sizes there were 272. This points again to the number of servants retained, which is shown by an edict against extravagance in mourning, levelled at a certain contessa, who on the death of her mother had put her eighty men-servants into mourning. Another edict forbids the hanging every apartment with black.

Two fashions seem to have been peculiar to Venice, that of wearing masks and that of the pattens, or 'choppines' as they were called. The masks prevailed at carnival time, which in the latter days of the thoughtless, pleasure-loving Republic was continued for half the year. The mask was not confined to either sex or to any class. From every member of the Gran Consiglio downwards, every one wore it. Even the women going to market, or sitting there to sell, wore them; and not they only, but the little children at their side, and the very baby

in their lap. There was a large manufacture of them in Venice. The pictures by Longhi have perpetuated this fashion, The other most extraordinary fashion was that of the high pattens, a straight unshapely piece of wood, half a yard high, on which the ladies stood, much as if perched on the top of a gentle

H 2

man's

man's hunting-boot. These were ostensibly invented in order to keep the fair wearer out of the dirt, on the few occasions when her feet might touch the common ground. But this purpose was rather contradicted by the fact, that they lengthened their trains in order to cover the choppine.' At this giddy height the act of walking became so insecure that, like the Roman matrons, when 'raising holy hands' in prayer, they had to be supported by a servant or a slave on either hand. These choppines were the origin of the name given to a Venetian lady, mezzo carne, mezzo legno.' The real cause for such an elevation was doubtless the advantage it gave them at tournaments, bull-fights, and other amusements in the Piazza, of seeing and being seen over the men in the crowd. Of course no painter condescended to leave a record of these monstrosities.

The mention of their being supported at this giddy height by slaves lays bare a chapter with which we have not been familiar, except through Shylock's retort to Bassano, Ye have among you many a purchased slave.' It is not difficult to imagine how, in the midst of Oriental temptation and opportunity, the traffic in slaves began. The Venetian merchant went forth not to rescue, civilize, or convert, but to barter and to gain; and this last, in the form of human creatures, was attended by no scruples of conscience. The Republic, as usual, passed stringent laws against the traffic, but their notorious inefficacy is proved by the innumerable contracts of sale, exchange, gift, and cession of slaves, preserved in the archives. These begin in the 12th century, and continue, in decreasing proportion it is true, till the end of the 16th century. It is a further sign of the times that in such contracts the signatures of priests prevail. Nor was the thing done in a corner. Cargoes of slaves arrived openly and were sold at S. Giorgio and at the Rialto. The greater part consisted of Russians, Tartars, Saracens, Mingrelians, Bosnians, Greeks, and Circassians; the female slaves ranging from twelve to thirty-seven years of age. The homage, such as it was, paid to Christianity in Venice, consisted in their being baptized; after which they were known by the names then given. Their lives in the later times do not seem to have been hard; they were so far better, indeed, than that of the domestic servant that they are often found to have been provided for by will, which never occurred with servants. But otherwise Signor Molmenti's pages form no exception to the detestable statistics which all slave-holding States have furnished; in addition to which he dwells on the fact that, in the sternness of moral retribution, the slaves in their turn enslaved

enslaved their owners, by introducing the lowest beliefs in witchcraft, sorcery, and other superstitions.

We have already presented to the reader a picture of a Venetian feast. The next and last sketch that may be attempted is the interior of one of the suite of rooms in the 'Ridotto,' a building in the Piazza, where gambling began at midnight and continued till day. Table after table was set out; at each of them a noble, seated with his back to the wall, holding the bank, which was spread before him in piles of gold and silver. He was not masked, but every visitor was; the ladies, as Beckford says, 'with innumerable adventures written in their eyes,' the only feature visible; all, male and female, losing and gaining immense sums with equal apparent sang-froid, and in the profoundest silence.

The corruption of the best is proverbially the worst, and the corruption of this hard, practical people, of whom Gibbon says that their policy was marked by the avarice of a trading, and the insolence of a maritime power,' offers the picture of a vicious effeminacy unmatched as yet in modern history-feasting, revelling, perfuming, masking, and gambling, with other pastimes best left unmentioned. With all these vices, it is easy to foresee the 'handwriting on the wall.' It came with the modern Attila. There had been plenty of warning. The French Revolution, fruit of kindred follies and vices, had given notice to all the European States to set their houses in order. But Venice had taken no heed, and the time for so doing was now over. Nor was there even manhood enough left in her chosen legislators to fear the storm they had conjured up; for of all the centuries she had known, her last (the eighteenth) was her gayest. Who now turned to that government, so jealously kept pure from all popular blood, and opened only to that of the nobles? Most of these, from the united effects of idleness, unbridled dissipation, and perpetual intermarriage, were by this time in a state of bankruptcy and physical degeneration. Yet even this last stage was deceitfully suspended; for the charms of the Enchantress city attracted rich foreigners in such numbers as to create a fictitious wealth. Even so late as 1789, the death of the wiser Doge Paolo Renier was concealed from the gay crowds, in order to leave the last carnival days undisturbed.

In the spring of 1797 the situation became acute. The Gran Consiglio held meeting over meeting, which equally betrayed their pusillanimity and their impotence. A Doge with some of the old buccaneer blood in him, or a government with some popular infusion, might have prolonged the days, or

rather

rather the agony, of the old Republic; but Buonaparte was destined to find one of the weakest of the long line of ducal princes on the throne. Ludovico Manin, a gentle, kind petit maître, who went about dropping his perfumed visiting-cards, had been elected because he was rich; for few of the older noblesse could now undertake the expenses of the office. He had not desired it, and wept when he accepted, and again when he relinquished it. At length, with two imminent ills before them, the massacre of the inhabitants by the French troops, and the sack of the city by them and their own Slavonian mercenaries; betrayed by the Barnabotti, now triumphing over their fall; cursed by the Cittadini, who attributed to them the ruin of the Republic; with a French pinnace anchored opposite the Ducal Palace; this artificially kept-up caste, on the 4th of May, 1799, voted for its own dissolution by a majority of 698 out of 719. The time was come; it had been for long one gradual but certain felo de se. The final blow was dealt virtually by themselves. In the embarrassment of their finances the chief families had borrowed the funds of the old convents, themselves hotbeds of vice, making shift to pay interest as they could. The suppression of the convents by Buonaparte for the purposes of confiscation called in their outstanding loans, and thus gave the finishing stroke to the deeply-involved nobles.

ART.