This Doge was Marco Foscarini, who was elected on the thirty-first of May 1762, and died on the thirty-first of the following March. He was a man whose integrity was never questioned, even by [Sidenote: _Rom. viii. 142._] the revolutionaries, and he accepted the Dogeship with the greatest regret. He was a man of letters, and the endless empty ceremonial of the ducal existence obliged him to leave unfinished his noble work on Venetian literature. Even had the Doge’s action not been hopelessly paralysed by the hedge of petty regulations that bristled round him, Foscarini’s experience of affairs in the course of occupying many exalted posts had left him few illusions as to the [Sidenote: _Rom. viii. 302._] future of his country. ‘This century will be a terrible one for our children and grandchildren,’ he wrote some time after his election. Like many of the Doges he was a very old man when he was elected, and was over eighty-eight years of age when he died, apparently much surprised at finding himself at his end, though not unprepared for it. He complained that his physicians had not told him how ill he was, and he asked for a little Latin book, _De modo bene moriendi_, which had been given him by his friend Cardinal Passionei; presently he tried to dictate a few reflections to his doctor, but was too weak, and expired whispering, ‘My poor servants!’ He had apparently not provided for them as he would have done if he had not been taken unawares. His successor was Aloise IV. Mocenigo, who had been Ambassador to Rome and to Paris. His election was celebrated in a manner that recalled the festivities of the sixteenth century. A secretary was sent to the Mocenigo palace to announce the news to [Sidenote: _1763._] his family, and the Dogess took four days in which to complete her preparations, after which she came to the ducal palace accompanied by her two married nieces, her sisters, her mother, all her own female cousins, and all those of her husband; and this battalion of noble women in their gondolas was followed down the Grand Canal by an innumerable fleet of gondolas and boats. All the male relations were waiting at the landing of the Piazzetta to escort the ladies to the palace, where the Dogess, seated on a throne, received the homage of the electors and of all the nobility. She did not wear the ducal insignia on that day. In the evening there was a ball, which she opened with one of the Procurators of Saint Mark. A series of festivities began on the following day, at which she appeared in a memorably magnificent dress: a long mantle of cloth of gold, like the Doge’s own, with wide sleeves lined with white lace, opened to show a skirt and body all of gold lace-work; a girdle of diamonds encircled her waist; her head-dress was a veil, arranged like a cap, but the two ends hung down to her shoulders, and were picked up and fastened to her back hair by two diamond clasps.