ere unheard of. Only
the genius of Shakspere seized the grandeur of a social organization
which was still one with that of Rome and Athens and Tyre. The merchant
of Venice is with him "a royal merchant." His "argosies o'ertop the
petty traffickers." At the moment when feudalism was about to vanish
away, the poet comprehended the grandeur of that commerce which it
scorned and the grandeur of the one State which had carried the nobler
classic tradition across ages of brutality and ignorance. The great
commercial State, whose merchants are nobles, whose nobles are Romans,
rises in all its majesty before us in the 'Merchant of Venice.'

TWO VENETIAN STUDIES.

II.

VENICE AND TINTORETTO.

The fall of Venice dates from the League of Cambray, but her victory
over the crowd of her assailants was followed by half a century of peace
and glory such as she had never known. Her losses on the mainland were
in reality a gain, enforcing as they did the cessation of that policy of
Italian aggression which had eaten like a canker into the resources of
the State and drawn her from her natural career of commerce and
aggrandizement on the sea. If the political power of Venice became less,
her political influence grew greater than ever. The statesmen of France,
of England, and of Germany studied in the cool, grave school of her
Senate. We need only turn to 'Othello' to find reflected the universal
reverence for the wisdom of her policy and the order of her streets. No
policy, however wise, could indeed avert her fall. The Turkish
occupation of Egypt and the Portuguese discovery of a sea route round
the Cape of Good Hope were destined to rob the Republic of that trade
with the East which was the life-blood of its commerce. But, though the
blow was already dealt, its effects were for a time hardly discernible.
On the contrary, the accumulated wealth of centuries poured itself out
in an almost riotous prodigality. A new Venice, a Venice of loftier
palaces, of statelier colonnades, rose under Palladio and Sansovino
along the line of its canals. In the deep peace of the sixteenth
century, a peace unbroken even by religious struggles (for Venice was
the one State exempt from the struggle of the Reformation), literature
and art won their highest triumphs. The press of the Aldi gave for the
first time the masterpieces of Greek poetry to Europe. The novels of
Venice furnished plots for our own drama, and became the origin of
mode