II. LATRATOR ANUBIS 221

were brought home by the Doge in 1126, no one could be found able to set them up until the year 1171, when a certain Lombard, called Nicholas of the Barterers, raised them, and for reward of such engineering skill, bargained that he might keep tables for forbidden games of chance between the shafts. Whereupon the Senate ordered that executions should also take place between them.

17. You read, and smile, and pass on with a dim sense of having heard something like a good story.

Yes; of which I will pray you to remark, that at that uncivilized time, games of chance were forbidden in Venice, and that in these modern civilized times they are not forbidden; and one, that of the lottery, even promoted by the Government, is gainful: and that perhaps the Venetian people might find itself more prosperous on the whole by obeying that law of their fathers,* and ordering that no lottery should be drawn, except in a place where somebody had been hanged.† But the curious thing is that while this pretty story is never forgotten, about the raising of the pillars, nothing is ever so much as questioned about who put their tops and bases to them!-nothing about the resolution that lion or saint should stand to preach on them,-nothing about the Saint’s sermon, or the Lion’s;-nor enough, even, concerning the name or occupation of Nicholas the Barterer, to lead the pensive traveller into a profitable observance of the appointment of Fate, that in this Tyre of the West, the city of merchants, her monuments of triumph over the Tyre of the East, should for ever stand signed by a tradition recording the stern

* Have you ever read The Fortunes of Nigel with attention to the moral of it?¹

† It orders now that the drawing should be at the foot of St. Mark’s Campanile: and, weekly, the mob of Venice, gathered for the event, fills the marble porches with its anxious murmur.

¹ [i.e., Nigel’s misfortunes all follow from his disobeying his father and going to a gambling place.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]