"Hail to the new Doge Alviso Mocenigo!" Proveditor General at sea, and commander in Dalmatia, whom the Great Chancellor was conveying to his coronation. The mass del Spirito Santo was sung in the cathedral of the patron saint, Marco. Its vast dome, upheld by nearly three hundred columns of marble and porphyry, towering like an eastern pagoda, and brilliant with alabaster and emeralds, the spoil of rifled Constantinople, reverberated to the holy anthem within, and the joyous bursts of loyalty without. Amidst the clangour of bells and the shouts of the people, the new Doge embarked in a magnificent gondola, covered with a canopy of velvet and gold and decorated with the banners of the knights of the Golden Stole and St. Mark the Glorious. Onward it moved, amid beating of drums, braying of trumpets, the booming of artillery and the acclamations of the people, towards the Palazzo di San Marco, followed by two hundred gondolas bearing the standards of noble families; and surrounded by the gleaming bayonets and halberds of the Dalmatians, the Sclavonians, and other battalions of the Venetian capelletti. The two great pillars, surmounted by gigantic lions, which formerly stood on the Piræus of Athens, and now erected in the arsenal of Venice, were enveloped in garlands of flowers and floating streamers; two hundred cannon thundered forth a salute from the banks of the grand canal, while the ships and galleys replied by broadsides in honour of Alviso. The nobles were escorting the new Doge to that lordly dome from which but an hour before the superb catafalco bearing the remains of his aged predecessor had departed. Scattering gold among the people, the Doge Alviso ascended the Giant’s Staircase; on the summit of which he was invested with the ducal robe and bonnet studded with precious stones. After which, the most noble Angelo Maria Malipierro, senior of the forty-one electors, made an oration to Alviso and his people. Amid this scene of joy and splendour—to which the bright meridian sun of a glorious summer day lent additional charms, spire and tower gleaming in its golden light, and the long vistas of the sinuous canals (where not shadowed by the gigantic palaces) shining like mirrors of polished gold—Giulio della Torre, who never again could partake of these festivities, stood an outcast felon, fettered and in rags, by the column of infamy that marked the site of his detested palace. Never did he feel the bitter agony of merited humiliation so much as at that moment, when the Doge’s splendid train, glittering with all the pomp of wealth and nobility, swept through the marble arch of the Rialto.