Martial vigour ebbed slowly but surely. During the war of the Spanish Succession, when, the course of fortune having shifted, Europe combined to resist the overbearing power of Louis XIV and the House of Bourbon, Venice remained neutral. Like an old dog which has fought many good fights in its youth and prime, and now, lame and scarred, maintains a dignified abstention from canine frays, Venice lay back. In 1718, after the war with Turkey in which she lost the Morea, she took part in the treaty between Austria and Turkey. This was her last active diplomatic intervention in the affairs of Europe. She had lost Cyprus, Crete, the Morea; and now her province in Italy, bits of Illyria, and some of the Ionian Islands, alone remained from her old empire. She shut her eyes to the past, and concentrated her attention on making her beautiful city "the revel of the earth, the masque of Italy." On the eve of the mighty upheaval of the French Revolution, her old sea glory flashed up under her last great admiral, Angelo Emo (1731-92), who cleared the seas of the Algerine pirates; but it was too late, Venice had run her course, and the end was at hand. _Spanish Provinces_ West of Venetian territory, the unfortunate duchy of Milan fulfilled its melancholy lot of being the prize possessed by Spain, yet coveted and fought for by France. Its history takes no special hold upon the memory. Against a constant background of French ambition (Richelieu, Mazarin, Louis XIV), the Spanish governors step forward upon the Milanese stage, levy taxes, scheme how to circumvent the French, and how to extend Spanish dominion, and then go home, a little richer but without leaving any definite impression on the page of history except as they have served to create the scenes depicted in the romantic novel "I Promessi Sposi." One has a vague idea of ceremony, bows, obeisances, ignorance, rapacity, and cruelty, but the idea is nebulous, and we need not stop.