Unhappily no such method can ever be even attempted where the remote past is concerned. The men and women of those times lived their own daily lives, found them not always interesting, and passed away without leaving us a single true record of twenty-four hours in the life of a man or a woman. Yet how intensely interesting even one such record would be! How the weary historian, seeking for the simple details of some simple life six hundred years ago, longs to discover a Horace Walpole, a Madame de Sévigné, or most of all a Paston family, amongst the yellow and dusty archives! Something, however, may still be got together to give an idea of what the non-political, non-historical Venice was in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. To begin with, though the Republic never showed much inclination to submit to any dictation from the popes, the Venetians were a practically religious people and extremely charitable. With the possible exceptions of Rome and Florence, no city of Italy possessed at that time so many hospices for the poor and hospitals for the sick; and considering the necessary limitations of all philanthropy at that early period, those institutions were managed and kept up with astonishing intelligence and care. I have no intention of compiling a catalogue of the buildings in which old people, invalids, widows, and pilgrims found a temporary or a permanent refuge, as the case might be; but it is worth while to notice here and there the sensitive delicacy with which charity was often exercised, and which seems so little in harmony with the nature of the more important historical events of the period. [Sidenote: _Molmenti, Calli e Canali._]