From the Lakes of Killarney to the Golden Horn

by Henry M. Field

A thousand years their cloudy wings expand

Around me, and a dying glory smiles

O'er the far times when many a subject land

Looked to the winged lion's marble piles,

Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles.

But poets are apt to look at things only in a poetical light, and to admire and to celebrate, or to mourn, according to their own royal fancies, rather than according to the sober prose of history. The picture of the magnificence of Venice is true to the letter, for indeed no language can surpass the splendid reality. But when the poet goes farther and laments the loss of its independence, as if it were a loss to liberty and to the world, the honest student of history will differ from him. That he should mourn its subjection, or that of any part of Italy, to a foreign power, whether Austria or France, we can well understand. And this was perhaps his only real sorrow—a manly and patriotic grief—but at times he seems to go farther, and to regret the old gorgeous mediæval state. Here we cannot follow him. Poetry is well, and romance is well, but truth is better; and the truth, as history records it, must be confessed, that Venice, though in name a republic, was as great a despotism as any in the Middle Ages. The people had no power whatever. It was all in the hands of the nobles, some five hundred of whom composed the Senate, and elected the famous Council of Ten, by which, with the Senate, was chosen the Council of Three, who were the real masters of Venice. The Doge, who was generally an old man, was a mere puppet in their hands, a venerable figure-head of the State, to hide what was done by younger and more resolute wills. The Council of Three were the real Dictators of the Republic, and the Tribunal of the Inquisition itself was not more mysterious or more terrible. By some secret mode of election the names of those who composed this council were not known even to their associates in the Senate or in the Council of Ten. They were a secret and therefore wholly irresponsible tribunal. Their names were concealed, so that they could act in the dark, and at their will strike down the loftiest head. Once indeed their vengeance struck the Doge himself. I have had in my hands the very sword which cut off the head of Marino Faliero more than five hundred years ago. It is a tremendous weapon, and took both hands to lift it, and must have fallen upon that princely neck like an axe upon the block. But commonly their power fell on meaner victims. The whole system of government was one of terror, kept up by a secret espionage which penetrated every man's household, and struck mortal fear into every heart. The government invited accusations. The "lion's mouth"—an aperture in the palace of the Doges—was always open, and if a charge against one was thrown into it, instantly he was arrested and brought before this secret tribunal, by which he might be tried, condemned, sentenced, and executed, without his family knowing what had become of him, with only horrible suspicions to account for his mysterious disappearance.

In going through the Palace of the Doges one is struck with the gorgeousness of the old Venetian State. All that is magnificent in architecture; and all that is splendid in decoration, carving, and gilding, spread with lavish hand over walls and doors and ceiling; with every open space or panel illumined by paintings by Titian or some other of the old Venetian masters—are combined to render this more than a "royal house," since it is richer than the palaces of kings.

But before any young enthusiast allows his imagination to run away with him, let him explore this Palace of the Doges a little farther. Let him go into the Hall of the Council of Three, and observe how it connects conveniently by a little stair with the Hall of Torture, where innocent persons could soon be persuaded to accuse themselves of deadly crimes; and how it opens into a narrow passage, through which the condemned passed to swift execution. Then let him go down into the dungeons, worse than death, where the accused were buried in a living tomb. Byron himself, in a note to Childe Harold, has given the best answer to his own lamentation over the fall of the Republic of Venice.[4]

We shall therefore waste no tears over the fall of the old Republic of Venice, even though it had existed for thirteen hundred years. In its day it had acted a great part in European history, and had often served the cause of progress, when it preserved Christendom from the Turks, and civilization from the Barbarians. But it had accomplished its end, and its time had come to die; and though the poet so musically mourns that