d from Pavia, Gaeta, Fano, Messina. Every quarter of
Italy had given its exiles, but above all the coast round the head of
the Gulf from Ravenna to Trieste. It was especially a flight and
settlement of nobles. As soon as the barbaric hordes had swept away to
the South the farmer or the peasant would creep back to his fields and
his cabin and submit to the German master whom the conquest had left
behind it. But the patrician had filled too great a place in the old
social order to stoop easily to the new. He remained camped as before in
his island-refuge, among a crowd of dependents, his fishermen, his
dock-labourers. Throughout the long ages which followed, this original
form of Venetian society remained unchanged. The populace of dependents
never grew into a people. To the last fisherman and gondolier clung to
the great houses of which they were the clients, as the fishers of
Torcello had clung to the great nobles of Altinum. No difference of
tradition or language or blood parted them. Tradition, on the contrary,
bound them together. No democratic agitator could appeal from the
present to the past, as Rienzi invoked the memories of the Tribunate
against the feudal tyranny of the Colonnas. In Venice the past and
present were one. The patrician of Venice simply governed the State as
his fathers, the curials of Padua or Aquileia, had governed the State
ten centuries before him.

It is this unity of Venetian society which makes Venetian history so
unlike the history of other Italian towns, and to which Venice owes the
peculiar picturesqueness and brightness which charms us still in its
decay. Elsewhere the history of mediaeval Italy sprang from the
difference of race and tradition between conquered and conquerors,
between Lombard noble and Italian serf. The communal revolt of the
twelfth century, the democratic constitutions of Milan or of Bologna,
were in effect a rising of race against race, the awakening of a new
people in the effort to throw off the yoke of the stranger. The huge
embattled piles which flung their dark shadows over the streets of
Florence tell of the ceaseless war between baronage and people. The
famous penalty by which some of the democratic communes condemned a
recreant cobbler or tinker to "descend" as his worst punishment "into
the order of the _noblesse_," tells of the hate and issue of the
struggle between them. But no trace of struggle or of hate breaks the
annals of Venice. There is no people, no