followers, were to come to San Marco, through the streets which open
upon the Piazza; and when the nobles and leading citizens should come to
the Piazza to know the cause of the riot, then the conspirators were to
cut them in pieces; and this work being finished, my Lord Marino Faliero
the Duke was to be proclaimed Lord of Venice. Things having been thus
settled, they agreed to fulfil their attempt on Wednesday, the 15th day
of April, in the year 1355. So covertly did they plot that no one ever
dreamed of their machinations."

As a previous step, in order to arouse popular feeling against the Great
Council, it was determined to practise a singular stratagem. Parties of
the conspirators paraded different quarters of the capital in the dead
of night, and having stopped at the windows of some citizens of the
middle and lower classes, and there insulted the women of the family
by scandalous and unseemly propositions, they retired with rude bursts
of laughter, calling each other loudly by the names of the principal
noblemen. Perhaps the rapidity with which their design was framed,
tended much to its concealment. Scarcely a little month had elapsed
since its first projection, and now the following day was to destroy the
constitution of Venice, to deluge her streets with patrician blood, and
to pluck up all her ancient stocks from their very roots, without a
suspicion of the approaching calamity having glanced across the intended
victims.--Either the Council of X could not yet have obtained its
subsequent fearful and extraordinary ubiquity, or the conspirators must
have exhibited a prudence and self-control rarely, if ever, paralleled
by an equally large body of men, engaged in a similar attempt. To their
minor agents, their ultimate design had not been revealed; and even in
the end, the discovery arose not from treachery, nor from incaution, but
from "a compunctious visiting" of one framed of stuff less stern than
his associates, and who shrank from the murder of a benefactor. The part