Count Daru has supplied the desideratum, so long standing, of a full, authentic history of a state, whose institutions were the admiration of earlier times, and whose long stability and success make them deservedly an object of curiosity and interest to our own. The style of the work, at once lively and condensed, is not that best suited to historic writing, being of the piquant, epigrammatic kind, much affected by French writers. The subject, too, of the revolutions of empire, does not afford room for the dramatic interest, attaching to works which admit of more extended biographical development. Abundant interest will be found, however, in the dexterity with which he has disentangled the tortuous politics of the republic; in the acute and always sensible reflections with which he clothes the dry skeleton of fact; and in the novel stores of information he has opened. The foreign policy of Venice excited too much interest among friends and enemies in the day of her glory, not to occupy the pens of the most intelligent writers. But no Italian chronicler, not even one intrusted with the office by the government itself, has been able to exhibit the interior workings of the complicated machinery so satisfactorily as M. Daru has done, with the aid of those voluminous state papers, which were as jealously guarded from inspection, until the downfall of the republic, as the records of the Spanish Inquisition.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. iii. lib. 5, p. 257, ed. Milano, 1803.— Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 6, cap. 7, 9, et alibi.
[2] Dumont, Corps Diplomatique, tom. iv. part. 1, no. 30.—Flassan, Diplomatie Française, tom. i. pp. 282, 283.
[3] Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. iv. p. 78.
[4] Flassan, Diplomatie Française, tom. i. lib. 2, p. 283.—Dumont, Corps Diplomatique, tom. iv. part 1, no. 52.
[5] This argument, used by Machiavelli against Louis's rupture with Venice, applies with more or less force to all the other allies. Opere, Il Principe, cap. 3.
[6] Du Bos, Ligue de Cambray, tom. i. pp. 66, 67.—Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 36, 37. Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. iv. p. 141.—Bembo, Istoria Viniziana, tom. ii. lib. 7.
[7] See a liberal extract from this harangue, apud Daru, Hist. de Venise, tom. iii. liv. 23,—also apud Du Bos, Ligue de Cambray, tom. i. p. 240 et seq.—The old poet, Jean Marot, sums up the sins of the republic in the following verse:
"Autre Dieu n'ont que l'or, c'est leur créance."