proud of their great rule, and when a son was born to a Venetian were
wont to say among themselves, 'A Signor is born into the world.'

Is it not true to say that Venice was the proudest city on earth, _la
noble cite que l'en apele Venise, qui est orendroit la plus bele dou
siecle_?[6] Life was a fair and splendid thing for those merchant
princes, who held the gorgeous East in fee in the year of grace 1268. In
that year traders in great stone counting-houses, lapped by the waters
of the canals, were checking, book in hand, their sacks of cloves, mace
and nutmegs, cinnamon and ginger from the Indies, ebony chessmen from
Indo China, ambergris from Madagascar, and musk from Tibet. In that year
the dealers in jewels were setting prices upon diamonds from Golconda,
rubies and lapis lazuli from Badakhshan, and pearls from the fisheries
of Ceylon; and the silk merchants were stacking up bales of silk and
muslin and brocade from Bagdad and Yezd and Malabar and China. In that
year young gallants on the Rialto (scented gallants, but each, like
Shakespeare's Antonio, with a ship venturing into port somewhere in the
Levant) rubbed elbows with men of all nations, heard travellers' tales
of all lands, and at dawn slipped along the canals in gondolas (not
black in those days, but painted and hung with silk), saluting the
morning with songs; and the red-haired ladies of Venice whom centuries
later Titian loved to paint, went trailing up and down the marble steps
of their palaces, with all the brocades of Persia on their backs and all
the perfumes of Arabia to sweeten their little hands.

It was in that year, too, that one Martino da Canale, a clerk in the
customs house, began to busy himself (like Chaucer after him) less with
his accounts than with writing in the delectable French language ('por
ce que lengue franceise cort parmi le monde, et est la plus delitable a
lire et a oir que nule autre') a chronicle of Venice. It is of the