of beauty, tho 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
city and which the shadow.

I would endeavor to trace the lines of this image before it be forever
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 sand-banks are mingled with the sky....

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 anywise to the
change in the form of her government, or altogether, as assuredly in
great part, to changes in the character of the persons of whom it was
composed.

The state of Venice existed thirteen hundred and seventy-six years,
from the first establishment of a consular government on the island of
the Rialto to the moment when the general-in-chief of the French army
of Italy[38] pronounced the Venetian republic a thing of the past. Of
this period, two hundred and seventy-six years were passed in a
nominal subjection to the cities of old Venetia, especially to Padua,
and in an agitated form of democracy of which the executive appears to
have been entrusted to tribunes, chosen one by the inhabitants of each
of the principal islands. For six hundred years, during which the
power of Venice was continually on the increase, her government was an
elective monarchy, her king or doge possessing, in early times at
least, as much independent authority as any other European sovereign,
but an authority gradually subjected to limitation, and shortened
almost daily of its prerogatives, while it increased in a spectral and
incapable magnificence. The final government of the nobles, under the
image of a king, lasted f