[380] [After the fall of Constantinople, in 1204, "the illustrious Dandolo ... was permitted to tinge his buskins in the purple hue distinctive of the Imperial Family, to claim exemption from all feudal service to the Emperor, and to annex to the title of Doge of Venice the proud style of Despot of Romania, and Lord of One-fourth and One-eighth of the Roman Empire" (_ibid._, 1831, i. 167).] [ld] _Monarchs sate down_----.--[D. erased.] [381] [The gondoliers (see Hobhouse's note ii.) used to sing alternate stanzas of the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, capping each other like the shepherds in the _Bucolics_. The rival reciters were sometimes attached to the same gondola; but often the response came from a passing gondolier, a stranger to the singer who challenged the contest. Rogers, in his _Italy_, laments the silence which greeted the swan-song of his own gondolier-- "He sung, As in the time when Venice was Herself, Of Tancred and Erminia. On our oars We rested; and the verse was verse divine! We could not err--Perhaps he was the last-- For none took up the strain, none answer'd him; And, when he ceased, he left upon my ear A something like the dying voice of Venice!" _The Gondola_ (_Poems_, 1852, ii. 79). Compare, too, Goethe's "Letters from Italy," October 6, 1786: "This evening I bespoke the celebrated _song_ of the mariners, who chaunt Tasso and Ariosto to melodies of their own. This must actually be ordered, as it is not to be heard as a thing of course, but rather belongs to the half-forgotten traditions of former times. I entered a gondola by moonlight, with one _singer_ before and the other behind me. They _sing_ their _song_, taking up the verses alternately.... "Sitting on the shore of an island, on the bank of a canal, or on the side of a boat, a gondolier will sing away with a loud penetrating voice--the multitude admire force above everything--anxious only to be heard as far as possible. Over the silent mirror it travels far."--_Travels in Italy_, 1883, p. 73.] [le] {330} _The pleasure-place of all festivity_.--[MS. M.] [382] {331} [The Rialto, or Rivo alto, "the middle group of islands between the shore and the mainland," on the left of the Grand Canal, was the site of the original city, and till the sixteenth century its formal and legal designation. The Exchange, or Banco Giro, was held in the piazza, opposite the church of San Giacomo, which stands at the head of the canal to the north of the Ponto di Rialto. It was on the Rialto that Antonio rated Shylock about his "usances." "What news on the Rialto?" asks Solanio (_Merchant of Venice_, act i. sc. 3, line 102; act iii. sc. 1, line 1). Byron uses the word symbolically for Venetian commerce.]