THE MAKERS OF VENICE.* THE author tells us in her

introduction, and we can readily believe it, that The Makers of Venice was a more difficult book to write than its forerunner, The Makers of Florence. The story of Florence is, in fact, the story of Dante, of Michael Angelo, Savonarola, Lorenzo, Leonardo, the story of "the lives and deeds of great men." "Florence is a city full of shadows of the great figures of the past:"—.

"But when we turn to Venice the effect is very different

Where is the poet, where the prophet, the princes, the scholars, the men whom, could we see, we should recognise wherever we met them, with whom the whole world is acquainted ? They are not here. In the sunshine of the Piazz I, in the glorious gloom of San Marco, in the great council chambers and offices of state, once so fall of busy statesmen and great interests, there is scarcely a figure recognisable of all, to be met with in the spirit —no one it horn we look for as we walk, whose individual foot- steps are traceable wherever we turn. Instead of the men who made her what she is, who ruled her with so high a hand we find everywhere the great image—an idealisation more wonderful than any in poetry— of Venice herself, the crowned and reigning city, the centre of all their aspirations, the mistress of their affections.

Her sons toiled for her, each in his vocation, not without personal glory, far from indifferent to personal gain, yet determined above all that Venice should be great, that she should be beautiful above all the thoughts of other races, that her power and her splendour should outdo every rival."

• The Makers of Venice Doges, Conquerors, Painters, and Men of Letters. By Mrs. Oliphant. With Illustrations by R. IL Holmes, P.S.A. London : Macmillan and Co. 1857.

It was this same spirit, this absorbing interest, this paramount attraction and unrivalled sovereignty of Venice, which made nearly all her writers into historians and chroniclers, so that her archives are among the fullest and most curious in the world.

And out of these old Venetian stories Mrs. Oliphant, by long and careful study which must have been as delightful as it was difficult, has made a most interesting, even fascinating book.

We ourselves prefer it to The Makers of Florence, partly, perhaps, because of the mysterious enchantment that hovers round everything Venetian, partly because of a charm and freshness entirely its own. The men seen half faintly in those old chronicles are made to walk before us, in their fashion as they lived ; not by any means a confused crowd, worshipping and fighting for Venice, but men with stories and characters of their own, as they stand on the Rive watching the ships, or go out to fight against the Turk and Genoa, or make their way through the wild, stormy night, as in Tiepolo's conspiracy, through the narrow ways, till they find the opposing side drawn up to meet them in the Piazza, and dash themselves to death and ruin.

This chapter on the closing of the Great Council, and the conspiracy of Quirini and Bajamonte Tiepolo, is perhaps one of the most interesting in the book, bringing oat strongly the peculiarities, then just beginning to be stereotyped, of the Venetian Constitution. But, in fact, each of the chapters, as we read them, seemed more interesting than the last. Nothing could be much more curious or pathetic than the story of the Orseoli in those wild early times, towards the end of the tenth century, when the life of Venice was yet young ; of the Doge Pietro Orseolo, who rebuilt the church and the Ducal Palace burnt in the rising against Candiano, and then suddenly, at fifty, fled from all his work and power to take refuge with St.

Romoaldo and the stern Camaldolites; of his son Pietro, who conquered Dalmatia, and made Venice mistress of the sea. It was in his time that the national festival was first instituted, on Ascension Day, which afterwards, in the Doge Zia.ni's time, developed into the great ceremony of the wedding of the sea.

Simple and religious enough, that early foreshadowing of the Sposalizio

"The clergy in a barge all covered with cloth of gold, and in all possible glory of vestments and sacred ornaments, set out from among the olive woods of San Pietro in Castello, and met the doge in his still more splendid barge at the Lido : whore, after litanies and Psalms, the bishop rose and prayed aloud in the hearing of all the people, gathered in boat and barge and every skiff that would hold water, in a faneatending crowd along the sandy line of the if It shore. ' Grant, 0 Lord, that this sea may be to us and to all that sail upon it tranquil and quiet. To this end we pray. Hear a., good Lord.' Then the boat of the ecclesiastics approached closely the boat of the doge, and while the singers intoned Aspergi me, 0 Signor,' the bishop sprinkled the doge and his court with ho'y water, pouring what remained into the sea."

From the simplicity of this, it is curious enough to look on eight hundred years, by the help of a certain little old pamphlet in pink striped paper. La Nuova Begia argue nell' Bucintoro, dedicated to the Serene Prince Alvise Mocenigo, Doge di Venezia, da Antonio Maria Luchini, Cittadino Veneto, was published near the end of the eighteenth century, in the saddest days of Venetian decay. It has a frontispiece showing the great • Buceutaur,' with her many oars and all her splendid ornamentation, surrounded on an expanse of rippling lagoon by gondolas like those of to-day. She appears to have been built, a new Bucentaur,' for this special occasion, and this very high- flown little book gives a full description of her splendours, counts

up all the glories of Venice, quotes largely from the Bible, the Fathers, and the classics. Among the decorations, we have the Nine Muses and Apollo ; the twelve months of the year, with their attendant virtues ; the hours of the day, waited on in the same manner; the hours of the night, attended

by the sciences, geography, &a. It is not till quite the end, of the book that religion shows its face, represented by the Patriarch and six Canons of St. Mark's; an urn full of water is blessed, and thrown into the sea, followed by the gold ring of the Doge, and the ceremonies end with high mass at the Church of San Niccolb. Says Luchini, as a termi- nation:—" Ecco descritta In celebre solennitil, di quest.) si lieto

giorno commemorabile per quo' secoli sino salit durabile il monde." It is strange enough, from this hollow, half-heathen display, to look back to those old times when Pietro Orseolo returned from his victories, and his eon Orso was building the Cathedral of Torcello.

There is real pathos in the story of Orso, beloved of the old. chroniclers. He and his relations have been so much neglected by modern writers on Venice, that he comes to us with the fascination of a new discovery; and for us, Torcello, his own cathedral, will always in future be associated with his name. First Bishop of Torcello, then Patriarch of Grado, then taking his banished brother Otto's place as Doge of Venice, and keeping it faithfully for him, while repentant Venice sent messengers to find him and bring him back, Orso did his duty loyally and patiently. But the search ended in disappointment, for Otto died childless in exile. So Orso returned to his patriarchate, and his brother Vitale being a Bishop, and his sister Felicia an abbess, the name of the Orseoli died oat in silence. Only the lonely Torcello remains as a memorial of a half-forgotten race.

There is a kind of dreamy beauty in these old stories, as Mrs. Oliphant tells them, which has in it the very spirit of the Venice

we know ; melancholy, enchanting, the solemn glory of sunset over those wide shining lagoons. The greatness has all passed away, the families are extinct, the palaces are decaying, but Venice is still queen of the imagination, a world in itself, and this royalty of hers is likely to last, though without the Bucintoro, as long as sara durabile il mondo.

One of Mrs. Oliphant's most romantic chapters—these stories are so full of the spirit of romance, that it is sometimes difficult to realise their actual truth—is that which gives an account of the Poli and their travels. Of course, the name of Marco Polo is familiar to every one ; but Niccolo and Matte°, his father and uncle, are by no means as well known. Marco seems to have been still in his cradle when these two worthy and courageous merchants started on their wonderful journey into Central Asia, which brought them to the city of the Great Khan, " a most courteous and gentle human being." And never, probably, in the history of that time, was there such an opportunity for missionary enterprise ; for the Khan sent the Poli back to the Pope, with a request for a hundred missionaries to convert the Tartars. What an opportunity this would have been, as Mrs. Oliphant suggests, for St. Francis of Assisi, who only fifty years before had started off to make the Crusades unnecessary by converting the Soldau! But St. Francis was not there, and the Pope was too busy with the Ghibellines, and the Tartars lived so far off that people hardly believed in them, not even when Niccolo, Matteo, and Marco Polo came back to Venice in sheep- skin coats after a later journey and an absence of twenty-four years. They had almost to prove their identity, which they did by cutting open the lining of their coats, and pouring out

streams of precious stones on the table. After this, says the chronicler gravely,—

they at once recognised these honoured and venerated gentlemen of the Ca' Polo, whom at first they had doubted, and received them with the greatest honour and reverence. And when the story was spread abroad in Venice, the entire city, both nobles and people, rushed to the house to embrace them, and to make every demonstration of loving-kindness and respect that could be imagined."

There is not any known name in the history of Venice, from the tenth to the sixteenth century, which does not find its place and its story in this picturesque and charming book. After the Orseoli, we have the later Doges, the growth of the Constitution, the tragical lives and deaths of Faliero and Foseari. Carlo Zeno, "a popular hero," has a chapter to himself ; so has the great soldier of fortune, Carmagnola, of whose character Mrs. Oliphant takes a kinder view than

those historians who represent him as an utterly mercenary and self-interested condottiere. The story of Colleoni, too, must interest every one who knows him as he rides, fierce and stately,

by San Zanipolo. But perhaps, after the early legends and stories, the most delightful part of a delightful book is that which belongs to the painters. The Bellini, Carpaccio, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoret, the subject of their lives and works could hardly be better dealt with than it is here. Mrs. Oliphant's chief admiration—for spiritual, perhaps, rather than artistic reasons—is given to Gian Bellini and Carpaccio. Her descrip- tions of St. Ursula sleeping, and of the St. George of the Schiavoni, are passages which one is glad to read over again; and of all the illustrations of the book, many of them extremely pretty, none attracts us more than the vignette of the head of St. George "charging down in abstract holy wrath upon the impersonation of sin and evil." Mrs. Oliphant does not profess to be an art critic, but few of her readers will deny that such criticism as she gives us is worth a good deal of technical artistic jargon.

The poets ought to walk in procession with the painters, but Venice has no poet. Petrarch, however, lived there for some years, and loved and praised the city almost as if he belonged to her. Her historians were the only writers really her own. The learned Doge Andrea Dandolo, Sabellico, Navagero, Sanudo, and many others, find their places among the makers of Venice ; Sanudo's story is told very fully, and with reason, for he was the greatest of the chroniclers, and his library, in the early days of the sixteenth century, ranked with San Marco and the Arsenal among the three chief sights of Venice. We have also an account of Aldus, the ideal printer, whose house is still to be seen in the Campo di San Agostino.

It is perhaps unnecessary to give a more detailed review of a book which must delight every one who reads it. Whether the writings of those old chroniclers are sternly and literally history, we will not venture to say; but certainly this is among the most charming of the many charming books that have been inspired by Venice.