prouder eminence to less pitied destruction. The exaltation, the sin,
and the punishment of Tyre have been recorded for us, in perhaps the
most touching words ever uttered by the Prophets of Israel against the
cities of the stranger. But we read them as a lovely song; and close our
ears to the sternness of their warning: for the very depth of the Fall
of Tyre has blinded us to its reality, and we forget, as we watch the
bleaching of the rocks between the sunshine and the sea, that they were
once 'as in Eden, the garden of God.' Her successor, like her in
perfection of beauty, though less in endurance of dominion, is still
left for our beholding in the final period of her decline: a ghost upon
the sands of the sea, so weak--so quiet,--so bereft of all but her
loveliness, that we might well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection
in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City, and which the Shadow. I
would endeavor to trace the lines of this image before it be for ever
lost, and to record, as far as I may, the warning which seems to me to
be uttered by every one of the fast-gaining waves, that beat, like
passing bells, against the STONES OF VENICE.

"It would be difficult to overrate the value of the lessons which might
be derived from a faithful study of the history of this strange and
mighty city: a history which, in spite of the labor of countless
chroniclers, remains in vague and disputable outline,--barred with
brightness and shade, like the far away edge of her own ocean, where the
surf and the sandbank are mingled with the sky. The inquiries in which
we have to engage will hardly render this outline clearer, but their
results will, in some degree, alter its aspect; and, so far as they bear
upon it at all, they possess an interest of a far higher kind than that
usually belonging to architectural investigations. I may, perhaps, in
the outset, and in few words, enable the general reader to form a
clearer idea of the importance of every existing expression of Venetian
character through Venetian art and of the breadth of interest which the
true history of Venice embraces, than he is likely to have gleaned from
the current fables of her mystery or magnificence.

"Venice is usually conceived as an oligarchy: she was so during a period
less than the half of her existence, and that including the days of her
decline; and it is one of the first questions needing severe
examination, whether that decline was owing in any w