placed in command of a fleet, with orders to punish the Bey of Tunis and the Algerian pirates, he was well aware that his force was by no means what it appeared to be to the inexperienced public. In the course of the campaign his largest ship, _La Forza_, ill-equipped and worse officered, sank before his eyes off Trapani, and none of the other vessels could be relied on to do any better. Yet with such material and such men he sustained a conflict that lasted three years, and if he was unable to destroy the Bey of Tunis, he at least humbled him, brought [Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Ult. 150, and Rom. viii. 294._] him to terms, and obtained from him a formal treaty engaging to put down piracy on the African coast. France profited much by the result of this expedition, and one of the last documents signed by Louis XVI. before he fell was a letter to the Doge Manin, in which Angelo Emo was praised to the skies for the good work he had done. The Admiral was rewarded with the title of Cavaliere, the only one the Republic ever conferred, and with the office of Procurator of Saint Mark’s, but I cannot find that his advice as to reforms was ever listened to. A few years later, the Bey of Tunis broke his promise in regard to piracy, and Emo was again sent with a fleet to chastise him, but was suddenly taken ill in Malta, and died in a few days. He was poisoned, it is said, by Condulmer, his principal lieutenant, who at once succeeded him as admiral. The last Venetian fighting man was of average height and lean, and stooped a little; he [Sidenote: _Statue of Emo, Canova; Arsenal._] was pale, his forehead was broad, and he had blue eyes and black eyebrows, particularly thick and bushy. His mouth was strong, but the lips were thick and coarse. His remains were carefully embalmed in Malta and were brought home to Venice on his flagship, the _Fama_--‘fame’--which came to anchor on the twenty-fourth of May 1792. The body was followed from the mole to Saint Mark’s by the clergy, the schools, the magistracies, and a vast concourse of people. The funeral mass was sung in the presence of the Doge, and the vast procession wended its way to the church of the Serviti. To the martial sound of drums and the solemn roar of the minute gun, Venice laid her last captain to rest beside his fathers. [Illustration: THE SALUTE FROM S. GIORGIO] XVI THE LAST DIPLOMATISTS During the seventeenth century the Republic had no doubt of her own military strength, but nevertheless trusted much to her diplomacy; in the eighteenth the latter was the last good weapon left her of the many that had once been in her armoury, and skilled as her diplomatic agents were, their efforts could not prevent her from spoliation by the Turks, whose simple rule was to take first and to talk about rights afterwards. In a measure, too, Venice’s position as a neutral power was dearly bought, and more than once in the war of the Spanish succession her territory was the