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The ethical motives of Faliero are, first, the cry for vengeance the feeling of affronted or unsatiated pride, that runs through so much of the author's writing, and second, the enthusiasm for public ends, which was beginning to possess him. The following lines have been pointed out as embodying some of Byron's spirit of protest against the more selfish "greasy domesticity" of the Georgian era:
But where Marino Faliero should have hung wuz a black curtain. Well, he wuz a mean creeter; it is a good thing he can be shut out with a curtain. Josiah said he thought it would be a crackin' good plan to have a black curtain hung before the pictures of some of our public men, but Arvilly said, in a real dry tone, that "If we begun that it would bring up the price of black cloth enormously."
But Signor Faliero was as ignorant as they, and he had, in his turn, to make inquiry of the chief servant. When the company learned that the lion was the work of a scullion, Faliero summoned the boy, and the banquet became a sort of celebration in his honor. But it was not enough to praise a lad so gifted.
No prisoner, whose name is worth remembering, or whose sorrow deserved sympathy, ever crossed that "Bridge of Sighs," which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice; no great merchant of Venice ever saw that Rialto under which the traveller now passes with breathless interest: the statue which Byron makes Faliero address as of one of his great ancestors was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred and fifty years after Faliero's death; and the most conspicuous parts of the city have been so entirely altered in the course of the last three centuries that if Henry Dandolo or Francis Foscari could be summoned from his tomb, and stood each on the deck of his galley at the entrance of the Grand Canal, that renowned entrance, the painter's favorite subject, the novelist's favorite scene, where the water first narrows by the steps of the Church of La Salute the mighty doges would not know in what spot of the world they stood, would literally not recognize one stone of the great city, for whose sake, and by whose ingratitude, their gray hairs had been brought down with bitterness to the grave.
In 1092 Busita, daughter of Roger I., Count of Sicily and Durazzo, and wife of Coloman, king of Hungary, came here accompanied by Geoffrey Malaterra. In 1114 Ordelaffo Faliero took it, and in 1115 it was destroyed to the foundations by Domenico Michieli. Some of the inhabitants, with the bishop and clergy, fled to Scardona; the rest, with the notables, to Sebenico.
We wander with mingled feelings through its various apartments, visiting the halls of the Council of Ten, and the still more tragic chambers of the Council of Three. Many secret passages are threaded; we cross the Bridge of Sighs, and descend into the dungeons in which Faliero, Foscari, and other famous prisoners are said to have been incarcerated.
"The Venetians," muttered Kenelm, "decapitated Marino Faliero for conspiring against his own order, the nobles. The Venetians loved their institutions, and had faith in them. Is there such love and such faith among the English?"
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