The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-01-13

ages which followed this original form of
Fenetlnn society remained unchanged The
popuiace Of dependents never grow into
a people To the last fisherman and condo
Iier clung to the great houses Of which they
We're the clients, as the fishes of Torcello had
c,iung to the great mobiles of Altinum. No
uluerence of tradition or language or
blood parted them Tradition, on the con.
trary, bound them together No democratic
agitator could appeal from the present to
the past, as Rienzi invoked the memories of
the Iribunate against the feudal tyranny of
the Colonnas. In Venice the past and present
were one. The patrician of Venice simply
governed the State as his fathers, the curials
OF Padua or Aquileia, had governed the State
ten centuries before him. Elsewhere the
history of medieval Italy had sprung from
the difference in race and tradition between
conquered and conquerors, between Lombard
noble and Italian serf. The communal revolt
OF the twelfth century, the democratic Con-
stitutions of Milan or of Bologna, were in effect
rising of race against race the awakinp of a
new people in the effort to throw off the yoke
ofthe stranger. The huge embattled piles which
hung their dark shadows over the streets of
Florence tell of the ceaseless war between
baronage and people. The famous penalty
by which some of the democratic communes
condemned a recreant cobbler or tinker to
descend" as his worst punishment 'into the
order of the n0blesSe," tells of the hate and
issue of the struggle between them. But no
trace of struggle or of hate breaks the annals
OF Venice. There is no people, no demo-
cratic Broletto, no Hall of the Commune.
The palaces Of Torcello OF, Rialto were houses
not OF war, but of peace; no dark masses of
tower and wall, but bright with marbles and
frescoes, and broken with arcades of fretted
masonry.
In word, Venice to her very close was a
city of mobiles, the one place in the modern
world where the old senatorial houses of the
fifth century lived and ruled as of old. But
it was a city of Roman mobiles. The Teutonic
passion for war and scorn of commerce was
strange and unknown to the curial houses of
the Italian municipalities, as it had been
strange and unknown to the greatest houses
OF Rome. The Senator Of Padua or Aquileia.
OF Concordia, Altinum or Ravenna, had al
ways been merchant, and in his new refuge
he remained merchant still. Venice was no
''crowd of poor fishermen" as it has been
sometimes described, who were gradually
drawn to wider ventures and a larger COM
merce. The port of Aquileia had long
been the emporium of trade which
reached northward to the Danube and east
ward to Byzantium. What its merchants had
been at Aquileia they remained at Grade.
The commerce of Altinum simply transferred
itself to Torcello. The Paduan merchants
passed to their old port of Rialto. Vague
and rhetorical as is the letter of Cassiodorus
it shows how keen was the mercantile activity
of the State from its beginning Nothing
could be more natural, more continuous in its
historical development; nothing was more
startling, more incomprehensible to the new
world which has grown up in barbaric moulds.
The MOBILES of Henry Wis Court could not
restrain their sneer at ''the fishermen of We
nice, the stately patricians who could look
back from merchant-noble to merchant-noble
through ages when the mushroom houses of
England were unheard of. Only the genius
of Shakespeare seized the grandeur of a social
organization which was still one with that of
Rome, and Athens, and Tyre. The merchant
of Venice is with him "a royal merchant"
His ''argosies oertop the petty traffickers"
AT the moment when feudalism was about to
vanish away, the poet comprehended the
grandeur of that commerce which it scorned,
and the grandeur of the one State which had
carried the nobler classic tradition across
ages of brutality and ignorance. The great
commercial State, whose merchants are no.
bles, whose mobiles are Romans, rises in all it's
majesty before us in the Merchant Of Venice