who proclaimed before him: "Behold the wicked priest who displeased God in his life, and was taken in iniquity." (A. D. 1274.)

At this period the feud between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, which raged with the greatest fury throughout Italy, found its way into Venice, and afforded the more powerful of its inhabitants an occasion for making themselves masters of the state, and transmitting it as a patrimony to their descendants, up to the period when its ruin was consummated. We have already seen that this revolution, in favour of an aristocracy, originally personal and elective, and constitutionally dependent on the body of the people, but which afterwards became absolute sovereign of the nation, grasping the whole power of the state, and perpetuated it in certain families, had been preparing, through a long course of ages, partly by circumstances, but more by men, who were possessed of the power arising from property, and the perseverance requisite to turn it to account.

This revolution, however, unlike most others, neither rushed to its conclusion with precipitate speed, nor was brought about by any sudden catastrophe; but, proceeding by gradual and silent encroachment, it so engrafted itself on the trunk of the constitution, that though its fruits were somewhat different to the eye, the plant itself did not appear to have changed its nature. The illusion was the more easily practised, as the Venetian writers, beginning by the Doge, Andrea Dandolo, the first historian of his country, have all, up to the present day, concurred in asserting, or at least in suffering it to be believed, that the change of which we have been speaking, was not imposed upon an unwilling people, but accomplished in full accordance with their inclinations; that the aristocracy employed neither force nor stratagem, and that, so far from any civil dissensions having raged in Venice, the Guelf and Ghibelline factions were scarcely known there, even by name. Yet, so far is this from being the truth, that not only did the opinions and the animosities of these conflicting parties find their way into the city, but fermented there to such a degree as to produce a political crisis which we shall now pause for a moment to consider. We are induced to notice this more particularly, because it has never yet been investigated, and because it forms an era which gives a new aspect to the history of the republic down to the hour of her dissolution.

The examples of democratical government, which many of the Italian states afforded, and of which the Guelfs were strenuous partisans, recalled to the people of Venice the remembrance of their ancient rights; the rather as two generations had not passed away since the aristocracy had framed a constitution which, as we have just seen, reduced the sovereignty of the people to a

shadow, and their privileges to a dead letter: and such, perhaps, are the consequences to which the rights of property inevitably lead. Such were the consequences even in Florence, the most popular of the states of that age. The Guelfs, for the most part, belonged not to the mass of the people, but were men who, emboldened by the acquisition of moderate wealth and of the influence consequent upon it, aspired, first, to participate in the government, and, eventually, to wrest it from those who had long held possession of it; while those whose claims to power had acquired some antiquity, were in their turn assailed by competitors whose riches were of later acquisition. The struggle, therefore, in Venice, lay between such of the middle class as had recently risen to opulence, and the more powerful of the older proprietors. The people were the blind and wretched instruments of both. Owing to the commercial character of the Italian states, the contests between them were the more frequent; whilst, from the same cause, wealth accumulated with astonishing rapidity in the hands of individuals and families, whose only original patrimony had been a fearless spirit of enterprise and persevering industry. This was more peculiarly the case in Venice, whose institutions all tended to encourage manufactures, navigation, and commerce. We shall shortly have occasion to advert to certain of her laws, which were calculated to give an extraordinary stimulus to commerce, though it would probably be impossible to imitate them at the present time. We may add, that when the ancient families aspired to the acquisition of greater distinction, by the possession of territorial property in their Greek colonies, they began to disdain trade as a sordid pursuit; and although this process was exceedingly slow, it was yet sufficient to open all the avenues of commercial opulence to their humbler fellowcitizens.

As the latter rose to wealth, they naturally aspired to the guidance of the democratical spirit which, at that time, pervaded Italy, and sought to restore the old freedom of election, and the popular assemblies. For this purpose, they took advantage of the discontents of the poorer classes, who were burdened with fresh taxes for the support of the war with Genoa, which, with increased fury, and more doubtful success, then raged in almost every part of the Mediterranean.

Opinions,-political opinions more especially, which have their source in our physical wants, soon kindle into passions. It was, therefore, no difficult task to spread them, with all the force of indisputable demonstrations, among the multitude, by whom there is little hope of their ever being understood, and still less of their being rightly applied. In this state of the public mind,

the personal animosities of a few individuals grasp at every indication of popular tumult, in the hope of finding, either in the multitude or the government, a powerful confederate. Private feuds thus assumed the aspect, the character, and the weapons of civil war. Examples of this were numerous throughout Italy, but more particularly in Tuscany; and perhaps, to go farther back, Rome herself owed her republican government to the foolish vanity of Collatinus, in boasting of his wife's beauty, and thus awakening the brutal passions of Tarquin.

Giacomo Tiepolo, and Giovanni Dandolo, both sprung of very ancient families,-both illustrious for their military exploits and magisterial dignities,-both numbering many Doges among their ancestry, quarrelled, even to the shedding of blood. Tiepolo openly professed himself a champion of the aristocracy of birth, while Dandolo was the advocate of popular liberties, and of the admissibility to the offices of government, of every man, without distinction, who possessed the requisite means and capacity. The reigning party was thus placed in a situation of the utmost difficulty. On the one side it had to fear the revival of the ancient democratical institutions; and on the other, the necessity of committing the defence of its own privileges to a leader in whose hands victory would leave the means of rendering himself sole and absolute master of the state.

The council of forty, which, as we have seen, was almost coeval with the foundation of Venice, and which was invested with such large powers during the interregna between the death of one Doge and the installation of his successor, had frequently exercised the right (afterwards committed to a body of magistrates called the Correttori) of modifying such laws as experience had shown to be either injurious or inefficient. But, while they only modified them in appearance, they often entirely altered their substance. This they had not hesitated to do a century before, in regard to those which regulated the elections of the Doges. To these laws they now recurred with greater caution, as well adapted to further their design of causing the chief magistracy to devolve upon individuals in whom the popular party could not possibly find a head recognised or sanctioned by the constitution; and to whom the aristocracy might commit their cause, and the weapons necessary to its security and triumph, with little apprehension of their being betrayed or abused.

They, therefore, devised a new mode of electing the head of the government-a mode which remained unchanged up to the final extinction of the republic. It was marked by peculiarities which it would require a considerable detail to explain, and which we should despair even then of making intelligible, with

out the help of a diagram;—an expedient to which some Venetian historians, and, more recently, M. Daru, have actually had recourse. But as we can only afford to give a very brief account of this singular process, we shall merely say that it required that a number of electors, amounting sometimes to forty, should be five times indicated by chance; after which, they were to be individually subjected, an equal number of times, to a scrutiny, by which most of them were excluded, in order that their names might be replaced by others also drawn by lot. The whole were then subjected to the most rigid examination, in order that those who were eventually retained as electors might be such as were thoroughly acquainted with that precise combination of qualities, which the circumstances of the time, and the views of the ruling party, required in a Doge.

These complicated forms were admirably calculated at once to bewilder the people, and to lead them to imagine that individual interest and design were baffled by the impartial decrees of fate, while, in their turn, they exercised just that degree of control over fortune necessary to secure the republic against her blind and wayward caprices. At the same time, to guard against the possibility of either the Doge or any other man in power having any community of interest, or the slightest intercourse with, or dependence upon, any of the neighbouring states, some of which were under a democratical, and others under a despotic form of government, they enacted three laws: First, That the Doge should not marry any woman not a native of Venice. This remained ever after inviolate and unchanged. Secondly, That no Venetian should serve any foreign prince, either in war or peace. This, so far as patricians were concerned, was also rigorously observed, and the violation of it inexorably punished; up to the latest period of the republic, if they quitted her territory without permission, they inevitably incurred a sentence of perpetual banishment, nor could this permission be even asked without exciting suspicion. With regard to individuals of humbler rank, unless they held some office under the government, this law fell into disuse. The great difficulty was to prevent the sons of noble families from going to take holy orders at Rome, where they might accept ecclesiastical dignities from the pope, and might thence fall under suspicions from which no degree of merit could shelter them. We have already mentioned the example of Cardinal Bembo, and should our subsequent observations follow the current of events to the close of Venetian history, we shall have occasion to notice instances yet more remarkable of this jealousy of the ecclesiastical power. Even before the introduction of this

law, no member of the aristocracy, though as yet not hereditary, was permitted to form any private connexion with foreigners. A young lady of the Morosini family, at the period of which we are treating, was demanded in marriage by the King of Hungary. Before the government would permit the father to enter on the negotiation, it compelled him to renounce all his paternal rights, adopted the girl as daughter of the republic, and, in that character, bestowed her on her royal suitor. The Third of these new laws decreed, That no Venetian should possess landed property on the continent of Italy. For a time this was enforced, since, with the exception of a few sterile stripes of the shore of the Adriatic, the government itself had none. The princely domains of the ancient families accordingly were all situated in the colonies, while commerce, which they had not yet learned to despise, was continually adding to their wealth. But in process of time, as they lost their colonies, and extended their conquests in Italy, they admitted the most powerful families of the conquered cities into the body of the Venetian aristocracy; and this law was, in consequence, tacitly abolished.

As these enactments first presented themselves to the minds of the reigning party as means of avoiding the opposite dangers, -of the revival of popular rights, on the one hand, and, on the other, of the introduction of monarchy,-very few years elapsed from their first suggestion to their final and complete adoption. (A. D. 1275.) However indirect and informal might be their origin, it is unquestionable that they were no sooner introduced than they acquired stability and authority; and that they excited no suspicions in the nation, because they arose directly out of the two original and vital principles of every modification of Venetian government, and fell in with sentiments which appeared to be the indigenous growth of every Venetian bosom. These were complete national independence, and hatred of a domestic dictatorship. The Venetian legislators, therefore, were so far from dissembling their determination to repress at home the growth of those factions which divided the rest of Italy, that they loudly avowed it, and found in that avowal a sure means of acquiring popularity. It was, indeed, impossible to distort, and needless to demonstrate, the truth of those facts of which every man was a spectator. It was sufficient to warn the Venetians,-that the Guelfs throughout Italy were merely the instruments of the popes, who fostered their rebellion against the Emperors, by absolving them from their allegiance,-incited them to form themselves into democracies, and then domineered over them at their pleasure, and gifted them away as rewards, to those foreign princes who allied themselves with the church.