white marble, which comes from Istria, a hundred miles away,
and yet many more great pieces of porphyry and of serpentine on them;
inside they have, most of them, at least two chambers with gilded
ceilings, rich screens of chimneys with carved marble, the bedsteads
gilded and the 'ostevents' painted and gilded and well furnished
within." On his arrival twenty-five gentlemen attired in silk and
scarlet come to meet him; they conduct him to a boat decked with crimson
silk; "it is this most triumphant city I ever saw."

Finally, while the necessity of pleasure grows the spirit of enterprise
diminishes; the passage of the Cape in the beginning of the sixteenth
century places the commerce of Asia in the hands of the Portuguese; on
the Mediterranean and the Atlantic the financial measures of Charles V.,
joined to bad usage by the Turks, render abortive the great maritime
caravans which the state dispatches yearly between Alexandria and
Bruges. In respect to industrial matters, the hampered artizans, watched
and cloistered in their country, cease to perfect their arts and allow
foreign competitors to surpass them in processes and in furnishing
supplies to the world.

Thus, on all sides, the capacity for activity becomes lessened and the
desire for enjoyment greater without one entirely effacing the other,
but in a way that, both commingling, they produce that ambiguous state
of mind similar to a mixed temperature which is never too severe and in
which the arts are generated. Indeed, it is from 1454 to 1572, between
the institution of state inquisitors and the battle of Lepanto, between
the accomplishment of internal despotism and the last of the great
outward victories, that the brilliant productions of Venetian art
appear. John Bellini was born in 1426, Giorgone died in 1511, Titian in
1578, Veronese in 1572 and Tintoretto in 1594. In this interval of one
hundred and fifty years this warrior city, this mistress of the
Mediterranean, this queen of commerce and of industry became a casino
for masqueraders and a den of courtezans.

THE DOVES OF ST. MARK'S[55]

BY HORATIO F. BROWN

In Venice the pigeons do not allow you to forget them, even if one
desired to forget a bird that is so intimately connected with the city
and with a great ceremony of that ancient republic which has passed
away. They belong so entirely to the place, and especially to the great
square; they have made their homes for so many generations amon