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V. THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL 257
Council,”-the restriction, that is to say, of the powers of the Senate to the lineal aristocracy.
63. III. The third period shows us the advance of this now separate body of Venetian gentlemen in such thought and passion as the privilege of their position admitted, or its temptations provoked. The gradually increasing knowledge of literature, culminating at last in the discovery of printing, and revival of classic formulæ of method, modified by reflection, or dimmed by disbelief, the frank Christian faith of earlier ages; and social position independent of military prowess, developed at once the ingenuity, frivolity, and vanity of the scholar, with the avarice and cunning of the merchant.
Protected and encouraged by a senate thus composed, distinct companies of craftsmen, wholly of the people, gathered into vowed fraternities of social order; and, retaining the illiterate sincerities of their religion, laboured in unambitious peace, under the orders of the philosophic aristocracy;-built for them their great palaces, and overlaid their walls, within and without, with gold and purple of Tyre, precious now in Venetian hands as the colours of heaven more than of the sea. By the hand of one of them, the picture of Venice, with her nobles in her streets,1 at the end of this epoch, is preserved to you as yet, and I trust will be, by the kind fates, preserved datelessly.
64. IV. In the fourth period, the discovery of printing having confused literature into vociferation, and the delicate skill of the craftsman having provoked splendour into lasciviousness, the jubilant and coruscant passions of the nobles, stately yet in the forms of religion, but scornful of her discipline, exhausted, in their own false honour, at once the treasures of Venice and her skill; reduced at last her people to misery, and her policy to shame, and smoothed for themselves the downward way to the abdication of their might for evermore.
1 [The picture of Gentile Bellini: see below, §§ 97, 104, and above, p. 163, and Plate XLVI.]
XXIV. R
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
