Per mare e per tera,
E cataremo i Turchi,
Li mazzaremo tuti, &c.
In the proverbs, if not in the songs, a somewhat stronger impress remains of the independent attitude assumed by the Republic in its dealings with the Vatican. The Venetians denied Papal infallibility by anticipation in the saying, "The Pope and the countryman know more than the Pope alone;" and in one line of a nursery ditty, "El Papa no xè Rè," they quietly abolished the temporal power. When Paul V. laid the city under an interdict, the citizens made answer, "Prima Veneziani e poi cristiani," a proverb that survives to this day. "Venetians first" was the first article of faith of these men, or rather it was to them a vital instinct. Their patriotism was a kind of magnificent amour propre. No modern nation has felt a pride of state so absorbing, so convinced, so transcendent: a pride which lives incarnate in the forms and faces of the Venetian senators who look serenely down on us from the walls of the Art Gallery out of the company of kings, of saints, of angels, and of such as are higher than the angels.
A chance word or phrase now and then accidentally carries us back to Republican times and institutions. The expression, "Thy thought is not worth a gazeta," occurring in a love-song cited above, reminds us that the term gazette is derived from a Venetian coin of that name, value three-quarters of a farthing, which was the fee charged for the privilege of hearing read aloud the earliest venture in journalism, a manuscript news-sheet issued once a month at Venice in the sixteenth century. The figure of speech, "We must have fifty-seven," meaning, "we are entering on a serious business," has its origin in the fifty-seven votes necessary to the passing of any weighty measure in the Venetian Senate. The Venetian adapter of Molière's favourite ditty, in lieu of preferring his sweetheart to the "bonne ville de Paris," prefers her to "the Mint, the Arsenal, and the Bucentaur." Every one is familiar with the quaint description of the outward glories of St Mark's Square:
In St Mark's Place three standards you descry,
And chargers four that seem about to fly;
There is a time-piece which appears a tower,
And there are twelve black men who strike the hour.
Social prejudices creep in where politics are almost excluded. A group of Vilote relates to the feud—old as Venice—between the islanders of San Nicolo and the islanders of Castello, the two sections of the town east of the Grand Canal, in the first of which stands St Mark's, in the last the arsenal. The best account of the two factions is embodied in an ancient poem celebrating the fight that rendered memorable St Simon's Day, 1521. The anonymous writer tells his tale with an impartiality that might be envied by greater historians, and he ends by putting a canto of peaceable advice into the mouth of a dying champion, who urges his countrymen to dwell in harmony and love one another as brothers. Are they not made of the same flesh and bone, children alike of St Mark and his State?