astonished at, and recoil from the motives which prompted his crime,
they will not be altogether of a class which sets our comprehension at
defiance.[6]

At a banquet, which it was customary for the doge to celebrate in his
palace, after the bull-hunt, on the Carnival Thursday, a squabble had
arisen from some too pressing familiarity offered by one of the young
gallants of the court to his mistress. Michele Steno, a gentleman of
poor estate, was enamoured of a lady in attendance upon the dogaressa;
and, presuming upon her favour, he was guilty of some freedom which led
the doge to order his exclusion.--This command appears to have been
executed with more than necessary violence; and the youth, fired by the
indignity which disgraced him in the eyes of his mistress, sought
revenge by assailing Faliero in that point in which he conceived him to
be most vulnerable. He wrote on the doge's chair, in the council
chamber, a few words reflecting upon the dogaressa: "Marino Faliero,
husband of the lovely wife; he keeps, but others kiss her."[7] The
offence was traced to its author; it was pitiful and unmanly; yet it
scarcely deserved heavier punishment than that which the XL adjudged to
it--namely, that Steno should be imprisoned for two months, and
afterwards banished from the state for a year. But, to the morbid and
excited spirit of Faliero, the petty affront of this rash youth appeared
heightened to a state crime; and the lenient sentence with which his
treason (for so he considered it) had been visited, was an aggravation
of every former indignity offered to the chief magistrate by the
oligarchy which affected to control him. Steno, he said, should have
been ignominiously hanged, or at least condemned to perpetual exile.

On the day after the sentence, while the doge was yet hot in
indignation, an event occurred which seems to have confirmed the