showed signs of meanness. Sanudo tells the following anecdote. Alvise Morosini, one of the ‘Eternals,’ on the occasion of his marriage with a daughter of the noble house of Grimani, gave his fellow-Companions a very meagre dinner. Not long afterwards they got into the Grimani palace and carried off two magnificent silver basins; these were placed in the hands of professional buffoons who paraded the city with them, informing the public that the bridegroom meant to pawn them to pay for the dinner which the Companions were going to eat at the sign of the Campana instead of the dinner which they should have eaten at the Palazzo Morosini, and also to pay for wax torches for taking home the fair ladies who were to be asked to the feast. The paternal and business-like government of Venice, seeing how much the Companions contributed to the national gaiety, allowed them to transgress the sumptuary laws which were so binding on every one else. For instance, ordinary mortals were forbidden to ask guests to more than one meal in the twenty-four hours, but the Companions eluded the law--with the consent of the police--by keeping an open table all night, so that breakfast appeared to be only the end of supper. Even in the matter of the gondolas, the rule was that the ‘felse’ should be of black cloth, yet the Companions covered theirs with scarlet silk and the Provveditori delle Pompe had nothing to say. Then, suddenly, the government had a fit of morality, and in 1586 the Hose Club was abolished by law, all privileges were revoked, and the decree was enforced. Venice lost some amusement and much beautiful pageantry, and gained nothing in morality. It was not very long before the grave senators who objected to the Companions were seen in their scarlet togas presiding over authorised gambling establishments in the ‘ridotti.’ The Venetians were an imaginative people who delighted in fables, amusing, terrible, or pious, as the case might be. Their stories differ from those of other European races in the Middle Ages by the total absence of the element of chivalry upon which most other peoples largely depended for their unwritten fiction. One can make almost anything of a business man except a knight. Near the Ponte dell’ Angelo in the Giudecca stands a house which shows great age in spite of much [Illustration: PONTE DELL’ ANGELO, GIUDECCA, OLD WOODEN BRIDGE] modern plastering. The windows are gothic, of the [Sidenote: _Tassini, under ‘Angelo.’_] ogival design, and on the façade there is an image of the Virgin with the infant Christ in her arms. Higher up, a bas-relief represents an angel standing with outstretched wings as if he were about to fly away after blessing with his right hand the globe he holds in his left. In the year 1552 this house was inhabited by a barrister of the ducal court who professed unbounded devotion to the Madonna, and practised the most indelicate methods of improving his fortunes.