against the other. Its cells, termed the _Piombi_
or _Leads_, and which were entered at night by the _Bridge of Sighs_,
were a hell that closed on the captive never to re-open. The wealth of
the East flowed in on Venice from the fall of the Lower Empire. She
became the refuge of Greek civilisation, and the Constantinople of the
Adriatic; and the arts had emigrated thither from Byzance, with
commerce. Its marvellous palaces, washed by the waves, were crowded
together on a narrow spot of ground, so that the city was like a vessel
at anchor, on board which a people driven from the land have taken
refuge with all their treasures. She was thus impregnable, but could not
exercise the least influence over Italy.

VIII.

Genoa, a more popular and more turbulent republic, subsisted only by her
fleet and her commerce. Hemmed in between barren mountains and a gulf
without a shore, it was only a port peopled by sailors. The marble
palaces, built one above the other on the rocky banks, looked down on
the sea, their sole territory. The portraits of the doges and the statue
of Andrea Doria constantly reminded the Genoese that from the waves had
proceeded their riches and their renown, and that _there_ alone they
could hope to look for them. Its ramparts were impregnable, its arsenals
full; and thus Genoa formed the stronghold of armed commerce.

The immense country of Tuscany, governed and rendered illustrious by the
_Medici_, those Pericles of Italy, was learned, agricultural,
industrious, but unwarlike. The house of Austria ruled it by its
archdukes, and these princes of the north, transported to the palaces of
the Pitti or the Como, contracted the mild and elegant manners of the
Tuscans; and the climate and serenity of the hills of Florence softened
there even tyranny, and these princes became voluptuaries or sages.
Florence, the city of Leo X., of philosophy, and the arts, had
transformed even religion. Catholicism, so ascetic in Spain, so gloomy
in the north, so austere and literal in France, so popular at Rome, had
become at Florence, under the _Medici_ and the Grecian philosophers, a
species of luminous and Platonic theory, whose dogmata were only sacred
symbols, and whose pomps were only pleasures that overpowered the mind
and the senses. The churches at Florence were more museums of Christ
than his sanctuaries; the colonies of all the arts and trades of Greece
had emigrated, on the entry of Mahomet II. into Constantinopl