something almost sublime in the unanimity with which the Venetians appear
to believe that these means were iniquitous, and that this tenure is
abominable; and though shrewder study and carefuler observation will
develop some interested attachment to the present government, and some
interested opposition of it; though after-knowledge will discover, in the
hatred of Austria, enough meanness, lukewarmness, and selfish ignorance to
take off its sublimity, the hatred is still found marvelously unanimous
and bitter. I speak advisedly, and with no disposition to discuss the
question or exaggerate the fact. Exercising at Venice official functions
by permission and trust of the Austrian government, I cannot regard the
cessation of those functions as release from obligations both to that
government and my own, which render it improper for me, so long as the
Austrians remain in Venice, to criticize their rule, or contribute, by
comment on existing things, to embitter the feeling against them
elsewhere. I may, nevertheless, speak dispassionately of facts of the
abnormal social and political state of the place; and I can certainly do
this, for the present situation is so disagreeable in many ways to the
stranger forced to live there,--the inappeasable hatred of the Austrians
by the Italians is so illiberal in application to those in any wise
consorting with them, and so stupid and puerile in many respects, that I
think the annoyance which it gives the foreigner might well damp any
passion with which he was disposed to speak of its cause.

This hatred of the Austrians dates in its intensity from the defeat of
patriotic hopes of union with Italy in 1859, when Napoleon found the
Adriatic at Peschiera, and the peace of Villafranca was concluded. But it
is not to be supposed that a feeling so general, and so thoroughly
interwoven with Venetian character, is altogether recent. Consigned to the
Austrians by Napoleon I., confirmed in the subjection into which she fell
a second time after Napoleon's ruin, by the treaties of the Holy Alliance,