The exaltation, the sin, and the punishment of Tyre have been recorded for us, in perhaps the most touching words ever uttered by the prophets of Israel against the cities of the stranger. But we read them as a lovely song; and close our ears to the sternness of their warning; for the very depth of the fall of Tyre has blinded us to its reality, and we forget, as we watch the bleaching of the rocks between the sunshine and the sea, that they were once "as in Eden, the garden of God." Her successor, like her in perfection of beauty, tho less in endurance of dominion, is still left for our beholding in the final period of her decline: a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak--so quiet--so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was city and which the shadow. I would endeavor to trace the lines of this image before it be forever lost and to record, as far as I may, the warning which seems to me to be uttered by every one of the fast-gaining waves that beat like passing bells against the stones of Venice. It would be difficult to overrate the value of the lessons which might be derived from a faithful study of the history of this strange and mighty city; a history which, in spite of the labor of countless chroniclers, remains in vague and disputable outline--barred with brightness and shade, like the far-away edge of her own ocean, where the surf and the sand-banks are mingled with the sky.... Venice is usually conceived as an oligarchy: She was so during a period less than the half of her existence, and that including the days of her decline; and it is one of the first questions needing severe examination, whether that decline was owing in anywise to the change in the form of her government, or altogether, as assuredly in great part, to changes in the character of the persons of whom it was composed.