The second category of nobles comprised by far the sanest and most intelligent part of the aristocracy, and it was generally from their ranks that the Quarantie were chosen, as well as the ‘Savi,’ and those magistrates from whom special industry and intelligence were required, or at least hoped. The Barnabotti had nothing in common with the two other classes, except their vanity of caste, which was so infinitely far removed from pride. As I have said, they owed their name to the parish [Sidenote: _Molmenti, Nuovi Studi, 308._] which most of them inhabited. Their nobility was more or less recent and doubtful, and almost all had ruined themselves in trying to rival the richer families. The majority of them had nothing but a small pension, paid them by the government, and barely sufficient to lift them out of actual misery. It was especially for them [Sidenote: _Horatio Brown, Venice, 109; Rom. ix. 7._] that the College of Nobles had been founded, in which their sons were educated for nothing, with all the usual imperfections of gratuitous education. Like the ‘New Men’ of the fourteenth century, they felt that an insurmountable barrier separated them from the older and richer classes, and the humiliations to which they were often exposed by the latter kept alive in them the sort of hatred which was felt in other parts of Europe by the agricultural population for the owners of the land. Their poverty and rancorous disposition made them especially the objects of bribery when any party in the Great Council needed the assistance of their votes against another. The better sort of Venetians were well aware of the evils that were destroying the governing body. In 1774 a member of the Council made a speech on the subject, in which he said that the greatest damage the Republic had suffered had been caused by the action of time; it lay in the already very sensible diminution in the numbers of the Great Council, which was, in fact, the government itself. He pointed out that within one century a large number of patrician families had become [Sidenote: _Cecchetti, quoting Arch. Ven. iii. 435._] extinct, and that the condition of the aristocracy must clearly continue to go from bad to worse. It could not be otherwise, since marriages were yearly becoming less numerous. A family was looked upon as a calamity, because it meant a division of fortune, and therefore interfered with those ancient traditions of almost royal [Illustration: INSTITUTO BON, GRAND CANAL] magnificence which appealed to the vanity of younger men.