invited Vincenzo Capello, Captain of the Fleet, to visit him at Richmond, and treated the Venetian with marked civility, taking him into a small private apartment, where he found Catherine of Aragon, the widow of Prince Arthur, playing on the spinnet with the Lady Mary Tudor, afterwards Queen Mary, then nine years old.

But the vast wealth accumulated by Venice, thanks to her world-wide carrying-trade and the great extension of her over-seas empire, based on that small foundation of the city in the lagoons, ended by rousing the jealousy of all Europe. The Empire, the Pope, France, and Spain united at Cambrai to break and dismember the Venetian Republic. A similar combination against England, arising from similar causes, might quite possibly have manifested itself in Europe at the time of the Boer war; the spirit was not wanting. The League of Cambrai, however, soon fell to pieces. The allies, as so often happens, as is happening now, could not see eye to eye among themselves. The Pope, alarmed for the independence of the whole peninsula, including the Papal States, broke away, the League collapsed, and Venice recovered her mainland possessions, though the Republic never regained its dominating position as the greatest Mediterranean sea-power. The Turk had appeared on the scene and challenged the supremacy of Venice, just as America or Japan may some day challenge the supremacy of England; the Grand Vizir brutally remarked to the Venetian Ambassador at the Sublime Porte, 'You can tell the Doge he has done wedding the sea; it's our turn now.'

But there is another more subtle and deep-reaching cause for the decline of Venetian commerce, and, by a curious coincidence, for the rise and expansion of England's trade. Diaz had reconnoitred the Cape of Good Hope in 1486, and, in 1497, Vasco da Gama had rounded it. This event profoundly modified the whole course of commercial history. It eventually threw the main trade route out of the Mediterranean into the Atlantic, for the merchant could now bring Eastern goods direct from the producer to the market without breaking bulk and damaging wares, by the tedious caravan routes which landed his bales on the shores of

the Levant. Venice, with her commercial acumen, won by long handling of trade, was instantly aware of the menace, and one of her diarists, on the receipt of the news, exclaimed, 'This is the worst misfortune that ever befell the Republic'; and some years later we find the Venetian Government supporting a scheme for cutting a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea, in the obvious hope that they could thus restore the commercial importance of the Mediterranean and, incidentally, of Venice.

The discovery of the Cape route ultimately ruined Venice, but at the same time it proved the beginning of England's commercial greatness. First the Portuguese and, after them, the Dutch reaped the benefit of Diaz's discovery and the opening of the Atlantic eastward; then under Cromwell and Charles II came the rise of England both in the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean. But the lively contact between Venice and the British Isles gradually dwindled till, in 1532, the last Flanders galley put into Southampton, and in 1587, the year before the Armada, the last Venetian argosy was cast away on the shingles at the Needles. Thus the Levant trade became open at the very moment when England, under the impulse of Burghley, was about to embark on her commercial career by the creation of such great trading enterprises as the Muscovy Company and the Company of the Levant, or the Turkey-merchants.

But, as was to be expected, this period of close contact between Venice and England through the medium of the Flanders galley, left its mark on the artistic and social life of the time. Shakespeare, for instance, must have met Venetian merchants in London, and he laid the scene of three of his plays, 'The Merchant of Venice,' 'Othello,' and 'Two Gentlemen of Verona,' in Venice itself or in the territory of the Republic, displaying a remarkable intimacy with local colour and local character, though we cannot conclude that he was ever actually in Venice. And Venice, as subject and scene, continued to attract English playwrights. Otway wrote his Venice Preserved' round the mystery of the Spanish Conspiracy, and Byron gave us 'Marino Faliero' and 'The Two Foscari.' A visit to Venice formed part of a young English gentleman's education. Reginald

Pole, Philip Sidney, John Harrington, to mention a few among the nobility, Linacre, Harvey, and perhaps Bacon, to cite names illustrious in science, all visited the city in the lagoons and its famous University at Padua, while some remained in Venice. Bolingbroke's rival, Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk,

'Toiled with works of war, retired himself
To Italy, and there, at Venice, gave

His body to that pleasant country's earth.'

In the Church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo you may see the tomb of another Englishman, Lord Windsor; and John Law, of Lauriston, creator of the South Sea Bubble, lies buried in S. Moisè.

The Venetian ambassador was a well-known figure at the Court of James I, and his residence on Tower Hill was, in all likelihood, a meeting-place for English and Venetians. We hear of the Venetian ambassador's bedroom at Knole, and Elizabeth herself not only chaffed the Venetian envoy, who was complaining of English piracy in the Levant, by saying, 'I would have you know that my kingdom is not so poverty-stricken in men but what there may be a blackguard or two among them,' but went even further and punned in Italian to the only diplomatic agent the Republic ever sent her just at the close of her reign. I had always heard,' she said, 'that Venice was founded (fondata) on the waters, but her long silence made me fear she must have foundered (sfondrata) under them.'

We have seen, then, that between the Venetian Republic and the kingdom of England there existed several points of resemblance and of contact. The development of both was profoundly affected by geography, both enjoyed a virtual monopoly of one prime necessity; both created from a small nucleus a wide-flung overseas empire; both became great sea-powers and virtual masters of sea-borne trade. We should expect to find that these coincidences would tend to produce resemblances in type of citizen, in the growth of their respective constitutions, in their treatment of their empire, in the general character of their politics. And so we do. To begin with, both England and Venice can boast great sea-captains and adventurers, men who were bold sailors

as well as stout sea-fighters, men like the brothers Zen who reach Iceland, Pigafetta, Magellan's right-hand man on his circumnavigation of the globe, comparable with our Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher, and all the Hakluyt brotherhood, who mingled trading and singeing the Spanish king's beard. The Cabots, whose monument crowns Brandon Hill at Bristol, came from Venice; their house stands at the end of the Riva, by the Ponte della Veneta Marina. In the annals of mighty travellers, men like Marco Polo, Caterino Zen, Giosafat Barbaro, may fitly stand side by side with Captain Cook and Mungo Park.

Both nations developed a certain practical sagacity in dealing with the lives of their citizens. As early as the middle of the 14th century, Venice had thought of a load-line on their ships, and enforced its Plimsoll mark for the protection of the sailor against the rapacity of the ship-owner. A little later a Factory Act forbade the employment of children under fourteen in industries which used quicksilver. The hospitals of Venice as of London depended on voluntary contributions.

Or, to turn to the constitutional side, though it is England's glory that she is the mother of Parliaments, the home of the free electorate, while Venice early became, and consistently remained, a close oligarchy, yet undoubtedly as Disraeli (who by the way was a Venetian Jew; his ancestors are buried in the Jews' cemetery on the Lido) saw, the British Empire was virtually governed by a close oligarchy of great land-owners during the brilliant period of the Whig ascendancy. There is one striking contrast, however, to be noted. While the Venetian aristocracy by retiring from trade to landowning, by substituting the villa for the counting-house, ended by ruining themselves, the English aristocracy by retiring from trade to the land, erected themselves into the ruling class for at least three hundred years; the reason lying, perhaps, in the fact of one essential difference between the two States: namely, that England was an island state her greatest industry was agriculture-while Venice was a city state with no territory immediately attached to it; and with trade as its chief source of wealth. The very success of both Venice and England in acquiring such vast over-seas dominions

drew down upon each a concentrated jealousy which endeavoured to tarnish the lustre of the achievement by accusations of unscrupulousness, greed, selfish egoism. Venice when she first became powerful in the Levant, during the twelfth century roused the hatred and suspicion of the Eastern Empire, and Eustathius, Bishop of Salonika, addressing the Emperor Manuel in 1174, calls Venice that bubble of the Adriatic, that water snake, that bull-frog of the mudbanks'; and another Bishop, addressing the Emperor Maximilian, during the war of Cambrai in 1510, uses almost identical and equally unepiscopal language when he calls Venice' resurgens et venenosissima Vipera,' that rising, crested, venomous viper.' England is accustomed to 'perfide Albion,' the 'nation of shopkeepers,' and even as recently as March 24 last, the Figaro' spoke with bitterness of 'selfish British Traders.' But it requires more than mere jealousy to account for the persistent animus against these two great sea-powers. Probably the truth is that both Venice and England were opportunist in their foreign policy; neither had a consistent, logical theory of conduct; both watched events, followed where they led, forced not the course of the river, and therefore drove their rivals mad by making it impossible for them to predict and forestall the respective lines of action.

The world has always taken two views of success: one, the general public, piazza view, is that nothing succeeds like success, that success is its own justification. As Byron has it, in his tragedy of 'Marino Faliero,'

'They try the Cæsar or the Cataline

By the true touchstone of desert-success.'

The other view, held, I admit, chiefly by the unsuccessful, is that success will seldom bear looking into. However that may be, both England and Venice were fully alive to the market-value of a good name; and if by chance their apparently ambiguous though successful conduct was attacked by their enemies, they would both have replied, like the lady in Macchiavelli's 'Mandragola,' that as her fall had come about entirely against her will it was clearly the will of 'Providence.'

But to quit these hardly seemly reflexions; the