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"I have shown it to a man learned in those matters, and he says that it is a ducat struck by one of the doges of Venice. "Well, we never found any more. The end of it was that the Makalanga caught us trying to get in to the secret stronghold by stealth, and gave us the choice of clearing out or being killed. So we cleared out, for treasure is not of much use to dead men." Mr.
"Then, obviously, I am no Venetian goblet; else long ago I should have shattered under the bitter, black juices poured by fate. It seems I am not worthy to touch the lips of doges and grand dukes; but let them look to it that some day, when spent and thirsty, they stretch not their regal hands for the common clay that holds what all their costly, dainty fragments can never yield. Nous verrons!
All the Venetians the men, that is, whom one sees in the Piazza have an air of profound self-satisfaction. And this palace of the Doges is no training-place for humility; for if its walls do not bear witness, glorious and chromatic, to the greatness of a Doge, it is merely because the greatness of the Republic requires the space.
Now comes the great and splendid Foscari Palace, once also a Giustiniani home and once also the lodging of a king of France Henry III, certain of whose sumptuous Venetian experiences we saw depicted on the walls of the Doges' Palace.
The four affectionate figures, in porphyry, at the corner of the Doges' Palace doorway, came also from the East. Nothing definite is known of them, but many stories are told. The two richly carved isolated columns were brought from Acre in 1256. Of these columns old Coryat has a story which I have found in no other writer.
The Tate has a brilliant oil rendering of the Doges' Palace by Bonington. The many Venetian water-colours which he made with such rapidity and power are scattered. One at any rate is in the Louvre, a masterly drawing of the Colleoni statue. To enumerate the great artists who have painted in Venice would fill a book. Not all have been too successful; while some have borne false witness.
In the mistress of the house, very elegant, very cultured, for example, a Madame Steno, you discover the descendant of the Doges, the patrician of the fifteenth century, with the form of a queen, strength in her passion and frankness in her incomparable immorality; while in a Florent Chapron or a Lydia you discover the primitive slave, the black hypnotized by the white, the unfreed being produced by centuries of servitude; while in a Madame Gorka you recognize beneath her smiling amiability the fanaticism of truth of the Puritans; beneath the artistic refinement of a Lincoln Maitland you find the squatter, invincibly coarse and robust; in Boleslas Gorka all the nervous irritability of the Slav, which has ruined Poland.
Grimthorpe was a curious-looking person, even at forty; in appearance a mixture of Julius Caesar, several unpleasant-featured Doges of Venice, and Voltaire in middle age. His looks were not entirely his fault and doubtless acquired for him, in his moral character, a worse definition than he deserved.
I think one might search the world over in vain to find just such another fascinating street as that broad street of Ragusa, with its exquisitely proportioned buildings that gave one a sense of gladness, the extraordinary great fountain, the miniature palace of the Doges, the noble churches and the colourful shops brilliant with strange, embroidered costumes exposed for sale, Eastern jewelry, and quaint, ferocious-looking weapons.
That bright circle of stamens is the very ring with which Doges once wedded the Adriatic, Venice has lost it, but it dropped into the water-lily's bosom, and there it rests forever. So perfect in form, so redundant in beauty, so delicate, so spotless, so fragrant, what presumptuous lover ever dared, in his most enamored hour, to liken his mistress to a water-lily?
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