CHAPTER VII

DIVINE RIGHT¹

77. ARE you impatient with me? and do you wish me, ceasing preamble, to begin-“In the year this, happened that,” and set you down a page of dates and Doges to be learned off by rote? You must be denied such delight a little while longer. If I begin dividing this first period, at present (though it has very distinctly articulated joints of its own²), we should get confused between the subdivided and the great epochs. I must keep your thoughts to the Three Times,³ till we know them clearly; and in this chapter I am only going to tell you the story of a single Doge of the First Time, and gather what we can out of it.

Only since we have been hitherto dwelling on the soft and religiously sentimental parts of early Venetian character, it is needful that I should ask you to notice one condition in their government of a quite contrary nature, which historians usually pass by as if it were of no consequence; namely, that during this first period, five Doges, after being deposed, had their eyes put out.⁴

Pulled out, say some writers, and I think with evidence reaching down as far as the endurance on our English stage of the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear.⁵

But at all events the Dukes of Venice, whom her people

¹ [Ruskin in his copy explains the title-Divine Right-“of Poverty”: see below, § 84, and, of popular election, § 81.]

² [See the Appendix, below, pp. 427 seq.]

³ [Above, §§ 59, 60, p. 254.]

⁴ [Compare, below, Appendix, pp. 443-444. Four should be the number, not five; namely, Zuam Fabricio (706), Diodado (707), Galla (720), and Domenico Monacaro (721). See the list of deposed Doges in Sanuto, p. 86.]

⁵ [Act iii. sc. 7.]

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[Version 0.04: March 2008]