Statue of Emo, Canova; Arsenal.
was pale, his forehead was broad, and he had blue eyes and black eyebrows, particularly thick and bushy. His mouth was strong, but the lips were thick and coarse.
His remains were carefully embalmed in Malta and were brought home to Venice on his flagship, the Fama—‘fame’—which came to anchor on the twenty-fourth of May 1792. The body was followed from the mole to Saint Mark’s by the clergy, the schools, the magistracies, and a vast concourse of people. The funeral mass was sung in the presence of the Doge, and the vast procession wended its way to the church of the Serviti. To the martial sound of drums and the solemn roar of the minute gun, Venice laid her last captain to rest beside his fathers.
THE SALUTE FROM S. GIORGIO
XVI
THE LAST DIPLOMATISTS
During the seventeenth century the Republic had no doubt of her own military strength, but nevertheless trusted much to her diplomacy; in the eighteenth the latter was the last good weapon left her of the many that had once been in her armoury, and skilled as her diplomatic agents were, their efforts could not prevent her from spoliation by the Turks, whose simple rule was to take first and to talk about rights afterwards.
In a measure, too, Venice’s position as a neutral power was dearly bought, and more than once in the war of the Spanish succession her territory was the
Rom. viii. 5, sqq.
scene of fighting between French and Germans. The same skill kept her out of the field during the quarrels for the succession of Parma, of Tuscany, of Poland, and of Austria, and obtained for Venetian Ambassadors a place of honour in the congresses that resulted in the treaties of Utrecht, Vienna, and Aix-la-Chapelle.