Mr. Hazlitt tells us[28] how the Sieur de la Haye, in writing of the Venetian aristocracy in the year 1670, mentions that, “whether they were in their coaches or on horseback, they were accompanied by a rabble of Hectors they call Bravi, many times only in ostentation, but too often for a worse end.” In the greater number of crimes perpetrated by the “bravi” of the city of Venice itself during the worst period, that of the Seventeenth Century, they appear to have done less with sword and pistol than with the arquebus and the stiletto; the employment of the latter is comprehensible enough on grounds of stealth and convenience, that of the arquebus I find less easy to understand, for it was an exceedingly clumsy weapon and possessed, as were all firearms of those days, of a tremendous “kick.” The only reason imaginable for its use is that it had the advantage of killing at a longer and, consequently, a safer distance for the murderer than a pistol, which could only be counted upon at a very short range. It was not, however, until the comparatively recent epoch of the last half of the Eighteenth Century that the “bravo” as an institution acquired his widest celebrity by the commission of what were practically acts of open warfare against the then moribund Republic of Venice. These acts were committed under the leadership of a man the like of whom Italy had not known since the days of the Despots, one Count Alamanno Gambara, a native of the parts about Brescia. Gambara may well and reasonably be called the Last of the Despots, for he was assuredly the last private person to terrorise a large district of Upper Italy, with both comparative impunity and a certain measure of hereditary authority. As one of Thackeray’s characters says of Lord Mohun in “Esmond,” he could handle a foil—and a bloody one, too—before ever he learned to use a razor. At an age when most boys are in the Fourth Form of an English public school, Gambara was the terror of the countryside in which his paternal castle of Pralboino was situated; so that, when he was only about fifteen years old, the Venetian Government found itself compelled to place him under restraint, his father being dead and his mother unable to control him. Finally, he was confined as a prisoner, first in Verona and then in the fortress of Palma, from the latter of which he escaped; for a while he wandered about the country, pursued by the police, who were unable to lay hands on him, until at last he decided to surrender himself to the authorities, of his own accord, which he did, and was exiled to Zara, the Governor of Dalmatia being requested by the Venetian Government to treat him with all possible consideration and to provide him with good company for the benefit of his moral welfare!