III. GROTESQUE RENAISSANCE 195

the throne, “SIFESTEGGIO DALLA CITTA UNO ANNO INTERO:” “The city kept festival for a whole year.”¹ Venice had in her childhood sown, in tears, the harvest she was to reap in rejoicing. She now sowed in laughter the seeds of death.

Thenceforward, year after year, the nation drank with deeper thirst from the fountains of forbidden pleasure, and dug for springs, hitherto unknown, in the dark places of the earth. In the ingenuity of indulgence, in the varieties of vanity, Venice surpassed the cities of Christendom, as of old she had surpassed them in fortitude and devotion; and as once the powers of Europe stood before her judgment-seat, to receive the decisions of her justice, so now the youth of Europe assembled in the halls of her luxury, to learn from her the arts of delight.

It is as needless as it is painful to trace the steps of her final ruin. That ancient curse was upon her, the curse of the Cities of the Plain, “Pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness.” By the inner burning of her own passions, as fatal as the fiery rain of Gomorrah,² she was consumed from her place among the nations; and her ashes are choking the channels of the dead, salt sea.

¹ [For a further account of the festivities and ceremonial pomp, which marked the accession of this doge and with it the dawn of a new era, see H. F. Brown’s Venice, pp. 280-283.]

² [Ezekiel xvi. 19; Genesis xix. 24.]

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