X. THE SHRINE OF THE SLAVES 337

buildings of the Priory, with rooms such as were needful for their meetings; and the privilege of building an altar in the church, under the title of St. George and Trifon, the martyrs; with the adjudgment of an annual rent of four zecchins, two loaves, and a pound of wax, to be offered to the Priory on the feast of St. George. Such were the beginnings of the brotherhood, called that of St. George of the Sclavonians.

“Towards the close of the fifteenth century, the old hospice being ruinous, the fraternity took counsel to raise from the foundations a more splendid new one, under the title of the Martyr St. George, which was brought to completion, with its façade of marble, in the year 1501.”

162. The hospice granted by the pity of the Prior of St. John cannot have been very magnificent, if this little chapel be indeed much more splendid; nor do I yet know what rank the school of the Sclavonians held, in power or number, among the other minor fraternities of Venice.¹ The relation of the national character of the Dalmatians and Illyrians, not only to Venice, but to Europe, I find to be of far more deep and curious interest than is commonly supposed; and in the case of the Venetians, traceable back at least to the days of Herodotus; for the festival of the Brides of Venice, and its interruption by the Illyrian pirates, is one of the curious proofs of the grounds he had for naming the Venetians as one of the tribes of the Illyrians, and ascribing to them, alone among European races, the same practice as that of the Babylonians with respect to the dowries of their marriageable girls.

163. How it chanced that while the entire Riva,-the chief quay in Venice-was named from the Sclavonians, they were yet obliged to build their school on this narrow canal,

¹ [“The confraternity,” says Molmenti, “was one of the most flourishing in Venice. It was instituted to unite, by means of religious bonds, the Dalmatians resident in Venice, but also in other ways to favour their interests. The confraternity obtained special privileges from the Republic, and, in 1640, Pope Urban VIII. accorded them particular indulgences” (Carpaccio, son Temps et son Œuvre, Venezia, 1893, cap. x. p. 117).]

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