Ignorance, as well as vice, was the mode in those elegant days, and it is related that a charming lady of good society once addressed a foreign _savant_ at her conversazione, and begged him to favor the company with a little music, because, having heard that he was _virtuous_, she had no other association with the word than its technical use in Italy to indicate a professional singer as a _virtuoso_. A father of a family who kept no abbate for the education of his children ingeniously taught them himself. “Father,” asked one of his children, “what are the stars?” “The stars are stars, and little things that shine as thou seest.” “Then they are candles, perhaps?” “Make thy account that they are candles exactly.” “Of wax or tallow?” pursues the boy. “What! tallow-candles in heaven? No, certainly--wax, wax!”
These, and many other scandalous stories, the Venetian writers recount of the last days of their Republic, and the picture they produce is one of the most shameless ignorance, the most polite corruption, the most unblushing baseness. I have no doubt that the picture is full of national exaggeration. Indeed, the method of Mutinelli (who I believe intends to tell the truth) in writing social history is altogether too credulous and incautious. It is well enough to study contemporary comedy for light upon past society, but satirical ballads and lampoons, and scurrilous letters, cannot be accepted as historical authority. Still there is no question but Venice was very corrupt. As you read of her people in the last century, one by one the ideas of family faith and domestic purity fade away; one by one the beliefs in public virtue are dissipated; until at last you are glad to fly the study, close the filthy pages, and take refuge in doubt of the writers, who declare that they must needs disgrace Venice with facts since her children have dishonored her in their lives. “Such as we see them,” they say, “were the patricians, such the people of Venice, after the middle of the eighteenth century. The Venetians might be considered as extinguished; the marvelous city, the pomp only of the Venetians, existed.”
Shall we believe this? Let each choose for himself. At that very time the taste and wealth of a Venetian noble fostered the genius of Canova and then, when their captains starved the ragged soldiers of the Republic to feed their own idleness and vice,--when the soldiers dismantled her forts to sell the guns to the Turk,--when her sailors rioted on shore and her ships rotted in her ports, she had still military virtue enough to produce that Emo, who beat back the Algerine corsairs from the commerce of Christendom, and attacked them in their stronghold, as of old her galleys beat back the Turks. Alas! there was not the virtue in her statesmen to respond to this greatness in the hero. One of their last public acts was to break his heart with insult, and to crave peace of the pirates whom he had cowed. It remained for the helpless Doge and the abject patricians, terrified at a threat of war, to declare the Republic at an end, and San Marco was no more.