group, and its name, as well as its site, is probably unknown to the
greater number of travellers passing hastily through the city. Nor is it
less worthy of remark, that the two most important temples of Venice,
next to the ducal chapel, owe their size and magnificence, not to
national effort, but to the energy of the Franciscan and Dominican monks,
supported by the vast organization of those great societies on the
mainland of Italy, and countenanced by the most pious, and perhaps also,
in his generation, the most wise, of all the princes of Venice,
[Footnote: Tomaso Mocenigo, above named, Section V.] who now rests
beneath the roof of one of those very temples, and whose life is not
satirized by the images of the Virtues which a Tuscan sculptor has placed
around his tomb.

SECTION X. There are, therefore, two strange and solemn lights in which
we have to regard almost every scene in the fitful history of the Rivo
Alto. We find, on the one hand, a deep, and constant tone of individual
religion characterizing the lives of the citizens of Venice in her
greatness; we find this spirit influencing them in all the familiar and
immediate concerns of life, giving a peculiar dignity to the conduct
even of their commercial transactions, and confessed by them with a
simplicity of faith that may well put to shame the hesitation with which
a man of the world at present admits (even if it be so in reality) that
religious feeling has any influence over the minor branches of his
conduct. And we find as the natural consequence of all this, a healthy
serenity of mind and energy of will expressed in all their actions, and
a habit of heroism which never fails them, even when the immediate
motive of action ceases to be praiseworthy. With the fulness of this
spirit the prosperity of the state is exactly correspondent, and with
its failure her decline, and that with a closeness and precision which
it will be one of the collateral objects of the following essay to