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to sue for peace,-gave it, in angry scorn; and set his sails at last for his own Rialto, with the sceptres of Tyre and of Byzantium to lay at the feet of Venice.

Spoil also he brought, enough, of such commercial kind as Venice valued. These pillars that you look upon, of rosy and grey rock; and the dead bodies of St. Donato and St. Isidore.

12. He thus returned, 1126; Fate had left him yet four years to live.¹ In which, among other homely work, he made the beginning for you (oh much civilized friend, you will at least praise him in this) of these mighty gaseous illuminations by which Venice provides for your seeing her shop-wares by night, and provides against your seeing the moon, or stars, or sea.

For, finding the narrow streets of Venice dark and opportune for robbers, he ordered that at the heads of them there should be set little tabernacles for images of the saints, and before each a light kept burning. Thus he commands,-not as thinking that the saints themselves had need of candles,² but that they would gladly grant to poor mortals in danger material no less than heavenly light.

And having, in this pretty and lowly beneficence, ended what work he had to do in this world, feeling his strength fading, he laid down sword and ducal robe together; and became a monk, in this island of St. George, at the shore of which you are reading; but the old monastery on it which sheltered him was destroyed long ago, that this stately Palladian portico might be built, to delight Mr. Eustace on his classical tour,³-and other such men of renown,-and persons of excellent taste like yourself.

13. And there he died, and was buried; and there he lies, virtually tombless: the place of his grave you find by going down the steps on your right hand behind the altar,

¹ [The Doge retired to the convent of S. Giorgio Maggiore in 1130 (being succeeded by Pietro Polani), and died a few months later.]

² [See Revelation xxii. 5; and compare Vol. XX. p. 169.]

³ [A Classical Tour through Italy, 1832, vol. i. p. 176 (“an exquisite work of Palladio”). For another reference to the book, see Vol. I. p. 88.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]