It was while this feeling was at its height, that the Venetian Assembly met on the 3rd of July. Manin recapitulated the circumstances of the war. He had failed to obtain even recognition for his Government from the French Republic. He admitted the growth of the feeling in favour of the fusion; and he advised his Republican friends to suppress for a time the assertion of their special political creed, and to accept the fusion as their only hope of safety. Tommaseo, indeed, protested against the proposal; but Manin's influence, assisted by the growing sense of weakness, prevailed; and on July 4, the representatives of Venetia by 127 votes against six declared their province united to Piedmont. Manin, however, resigned his office, as being unable to act as Minister under a Monarchical Government. But while Charles Albert seemed to be gaining partizans in Lombardy and Venetia by the growing necessities of those provinces, he was exciting against him the opposition of those who might at one time have been favourable to the Italian cause. On June 16, the Sardinian and Venetian fleets had attacked Trieste. As a military incident in the Italian war, this attack was probably of little importance; but its effect on the relations between the German and Italian movements for freedom and unity was of far greater importance than could be estimated by merely military results. For, in Germany more than in almost any other country of Europe, the movement for national freedom and unity was necessitating an amount of self-assertion on the part of the body which represented those ideas, which unavoidably brought it into collision with many whom it ought to have hailed as allies. Both the necessity and desire for this German self-assertion had been evident from the first opening of the Frankfort Constituent Assembly on the 18th of May. Even a small but picturesque incident which took place on the first day of its meeting indicated the strength of the exclusive and defiant German feeling. An old man of seventy-nine had attempted, during the first stormy sitting, to address the Parliament, but his voice had been drowned in the general hubbub. On the following day, the member for Cologne called the attention of the Parliament to the fact that the deputy so unceremoniously treated was the poet Arndt; and thereupon the whole Assembly rose, and expressed to him their thanks for his song on the German Fatherland.