d upon the same lines, so that they have a certain
general resemblance, and their excellence is in proportion to the
thoroughness with which they have learned their lesson.

The difference which separates Venetian from the rest of Italian
painting is a fundamental one. Venice attains to an equally
distinguished place, but the way in which she does it and the character
of her contribution are both so absolutely distinct that her art seems
to be the outcome of another race, with alien temperament and standards.
Venice had, indeed, a history and a life of her own. Her entire
isolation, from her foundation, gave her an independent government and
customs peculiar to herself, but at the same time her people, even in
their earliest and most precarious struggles, were no barbarians who
had slowly to acquire the arts of civilised life. Among the refugees
were persons of high birth and great traditions, and they brought with
them to the first crazy settlement on the lagoons some political
training and some idea of how to reconstruct their shattered social
fabric. The Venetian Republic rose rapidly to a position of influence
in Europe. Small and circumscribed as its area was, every feature and
sentiment was concentrated and intensified. But one element above all
permeates it and sets it apart from other European States. The Oriental
element in Venice must never be lost sight of if we wish to understand
her philosophy of art.

There are some grounds, seriously accepted by the most recent
historians, for believing that the first Venetian colonists were the
descendants of emigrants who in prehistoric times had established
themselves in Asia and who had returned from thence to Northern Italy.
"These colonists," says Hazlitt, "were called Tyrrhenians, and from
their settlements round the mouth of the Po the Venetian stock was
ultimately derived." If the tradition has any truth, we think with a
deeper interest of that instinct for commerce which seems to have been
in the very blood of the early Venetians. Did it, indeed, come down to
them from the merchants of Tyre and Carthage? From that wonderful
trading race which stretched out its arms all over Europe and
penetrated even to our own island? From the first, Venice cut herself
adrift, as far as possible, from Western ties, but she turned to Eastern
people and to intercourse with the East with a natural affinity which
savours of racial instinct. All her greatness was derived from her