We descend to the reign of Antonio Priuli (1618), in which occurred the conspiracy whose incidents are rendered familiar, though in a distorted form, by St. Real's romance, and the "Venice Preserved" of Otway. The romance is a travestie of history, intermixed with much irrelevant matter, the mere creation of the writer's brain; and Otway's coarse and boisterous tragedy is a poetical extravaganza, in which character is violated, not delineated; a drama for rabid sentimentalists who delight to contemplate pathetic villains and hysterical women. History affords but few particulars regarding the conspiracy. Sir Henry Wotton, who was the English ambassador at Venice in 1618, thus alludes to it in a general way: "The whole town is here at present in horror and confusion upon the discovering of a foul and fearful conspiracy of the French against this State; whereof no less than thirty have already suffered very condign punishment, between men strangled in prison, drowned in the silence of the night, and hanged in public view; and yet the bottom is invisible." The facts that can be gathered in detail are meagre. It appears that in the summer of 1617, Jacques Pierre, a Norman pirate, fled from the service of the Duke d'Ossuna of Spain, and found employment as a subordinate at the arsenal of Venice. Scarcely had he arrived in the Lagune, before he denounced himself as the chief agent of the Duke d'Ossuna and the Spanish ambassador, for the accomplishment of a plot to fire the city of Venice, to seize and massacre the nobles, to overthrow the existing government, and to transfer the State to the Spanish crown. For ten months he was allowed to communicate on the one hand with his complotters, and on the other with the Inquisition of State; but at the expiration of that term, he was seized by the Council of Ten, and drowned. The Ten had kept the depositions of Pierre secret; and it was not until three or four hundred Frenchmen and Spaniards had been delivered to the executioner, and the body of Renault, the companion of Pierre, was discovered, suspended by one foot on a gibbet, on the Piazzetta, that the people had any knowledge of the great peril that had been averted. An apocryphal account of the plot states that on the very eve of its explosion, Jaffier, one of the conspirators. touched by the magnificence of the Espousals of the Adriatic, which he had just witnessed, was shaken from his stern purpose, and revealed the conspiracy. Whilst, however, this last incident is beyond all question a figment, it is difficult to say how much of the previous narrative is true. We see a smile upon the face of our readers on the discovery that Belvidera's sorrows are all moonshine, that Jaffier is a phantom of the heat-oppressed brain, and the magnanimous Pierre a vulgar, piratical cut-throat, undignified even by crime.

Twenty years before the downfall of the republic, Venice had sunk into a modern Sybaris; her political influence was gone, her possessions had fallen from her, the national spirit was extinguished; she was content to be a general mart of pleasure, and a pandemonium of crime. Every day had its festival, whose pomp and circumstance formed the serious occupation of the nobles and people. The patricians were the presidents of gaming establishments, and the hired servants of the proprietors, who frequently were rich Jews. Shylock then fed fat the ancient grudge he owed them. A Venetian noble had now become so abject in mind, that no personal indignity could excite honourable resentment. When insulted, he confided his revenge to the arm of the hired assassin. The general use of masks emboldened both sexes, and all degrees, to indulge in the grossest depravity of behaviour. Courtezans had houses allotted them, and funds set apart for their use; and parents did not hesitate to barter their daughters for unhallowed gains.

"The Republic has lived," was the pithy exclamation of Napoleon, when, in 1797, he deter

mined on the final overthrow of Venice. On the 12th May of the same year, the nobles prostrated their city at the feet of the French general, "and proclaimed that the most ancient government in the world, which had just completed the eleventh century of its sway, was no longer in existence." In the following year, the city was ceded to Austria, under whose dominion it remains. The ancient majesty of Venice is recalled, at the present day, by relics of former magnificence; and the latest period of its decline continues to be reflected in the censurable manners that still prevail in this once "glorious city in the sea.”

The Rialto has been rendered a household word by Shakspeare, but it is not necessary that we should summon up Shylock the Jew, and "the gentle lady married to the Moor," since their association with the scene before us is familiar to young and old. The Rialto and the Ponte di Rialto take their names from the Isola di Rialto, the island whereon they are built. The Rialto is the Exchange, or place of concourse for the merchants; and the Ponte di Rialto, the celebrated bridge so often mentioned, is one of the links that connect the hundred isles of Venice. The buildings on the right of our view were erected after the fire of 1513, which laid nearly the whole city in ruins. The nearest structure, supported by arcades, is a portion of the Fabbrico Nuovo, and adjoining it is the Fabbrico Vecchio; the latter is now appropriated to the Imperial Tribunal of Justice, and the building beyond it, which interrupts the view of the Bridge, is the seat of the Imperial Tribunal of Appeal. Through the arcades of the Fabbrico Vecchio lies the approach to the Exchange. Sabellico, whose work on Venice was published in 1492, a few years before the great fire, says of the Exchange,—“ There the merchants meet in a noble piazza, in which all the commercial affairs of the city, and that is to say of the world, are transacted. It is crowded, with scarcely any intervention, from morning to night. Yet in spite of the crowd, there is no bustle, no altercation, no struggling, no quarrel." The Bridge of the Rialto was originally constructed of wood. The present structure was built in the year 1591, by Antonio da Ponte. The Venetians regard it as the finest arch in the world, and endeavour to add to its distinction by attributing its design either to Palladio, or to Michael Angelo. It has three passages, of which the one in the centre is the widest; and on either side are rows of shops, occupied chiefly by jewellers and haberdashers. Beyond the Bridge, is seen the tower of the church of St. Salvadore. The large building on the left

of the view, contains the Offices of the Excise and Finance. An edifice, anciently named the Fondaca di Tedeschi, was the commercial factory of the Germans in the thirteenth century, and prior to that period, the residence of the Signory of Venice. This old building was destroyed by fire in 1505, and the present structure, which is said to contain two hundred chambers, was erected on its site by Giovanni Giocondo of Verona. Giorgione was employed to paint the façade fronting the Great Canal, and the grand entrance was adorned by Titian, and the praises lavished on the latter were so ungrateful to the ear of Giorgione, that he ever after renounced all intimacy with his pupil

BAPTISTERY OF ST. MARK

、

The Church of St. Mark, from its first foundation in the tenth century, until its final completion in 1111, was an object of especial regard to the Doges, who devoted themselves to its progress and adornment. Its excess of ornament, in columns and screens, statues, arabesques, and mosaics, destroys the impressive effect which its scale of grandeur and magnitude would otherwise have produced. It is difficult to describe its architecture. The original plan was a Greek cross, and the adornments are Byzantine, Syriac, and Gothic, with much that cannot be referred to any known type or style. The subdued light renders the interior very striking, although under a stronger illumination the elaborate ornaments would distract the eye, and produce a meretricious effect. San Marco is set with rich objects won by Venetian enterprise and valour. In the principal front, there are five hundred splendid columns of precious marbles, of various colours; some polygonal, some with Armenian and Syrian inscriptions deeply engraven, the whole presenting a multiform enigma to the mind. The character of the entire building is rich and strange, full of mystery and meaning.

The chapel of the Baptistery is enriched with mosaics of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, representing, amongst other subjects, the baptism of Christ. One of the bronze doors is said to have been brought from the basilica of St. Sophia, at Constantinople. The Benetier, or water vase, is a work in porphyry, of the fifteenth century. It is supported by an antique altar of Greek sculpture, ornamented with dolphins and tridents, the attributes of Neptune, which though not inappropriate to Venice, can by no stretch of fancy be construed into emblems of St. Mark. A statue of the Baptist in bronze, the work of Francisco Segala, is placed over the font. The chapel of the Baptistery contains the tomb of Andrea Dandolo, the last Doge who obtained the honour of interment in St. Mark's. He was "an intrepid warrior and a skilful politician, the friend of Petrarch, and the oldest historian of Venice, as his ancestor was the greatest hero"