The effect on the internal politics of the city was also fatal. The nobility, who had hitherto enriched themselves by trade, either took to banking, which could not last without the aliment of commerce, or invested their savings in land, and became an idle class. Poverty increased, and the aristocracy of Venice was weakened by internal feuds. The rich monopolised the administration, while the less fortunate, with a majority in the Great Council, were ever attempting to overthrow their power by agitation, or by intrigues and plots, often with foreigners. Thus Venice, which had long been the admiration of Europe for the stability of her government, and the honour and patriotism of her nobility, became the victim of selfishness, corruption, and conspiracy. It is this which explains the growing power of ‘The Ten.’ This executive committee, an excrescence on the original constitution, first organised for temporary objects in 1310, assumed more and more the character of a committee of public safety, and with the three inquisitors, created in 1539 to deal more efficiently with treason, gave to the government a character of mystery, suspicion, and cruelty, hitherto unknown. A loss of moral tone accompanied this decline. As the wealth of the state decreased, the extravagance, both public and private, grew. At no date were the public pageants so magnificent, or the private luxury so unbridled. In more vital questions of morality, though Venice had never maintained a high standard, even for Italy, she now fell lower, and private crime went almost unpunished. It would be absurd to attribute this degradation entirely to the loss of her prestige and power, but that it was increased thereby no one can doubt. Yet Venice still survived. Protected by her impregnable position, and served by her clever diplomatists, who resided at every court and carefully steered the country through the mazes of European intrigue, she continued the Queen of the Lagoons, if no longer of the Mediterranean, ‘The admiredst citie of the world’ for her buildings, her blue lagoons, and azure skies. In the domain of art she had something still to give the world. The sixteenth century is the age of Titian (1477-1576), Tintoret (1512-1594), and Paolo Veronese (1532-1588), in whose works painting reached its climax of technique, of elaborate and harmonious grouping, and of gorgeous, if somewhat sensuous, colour; while to the Aldine Press we owe some of the earliest triumphs of the art of printing. In her struggle with the Papacy, in the later decades of the sixteenth and the first of the seventeenth centuries, Venice showed the world once more, as she had in days gone by, that though she accepted her religion from Rome, she was determined and powerful enough to maintain her independence in matters of church government.