We may set side by side two pictures of the Arsenal, one drawn from a curious little work of early seventeenth century, a time at which, though Venice was moving down the path of her decay, the glorious traditions of the past still found renewal in her present life, and the Venetian fleet was still a triumphant symbol of Venetian greatness; the other from the reports of her officials in the last years before her death. Luca Assarino was one of many guests who had to say to Venice, or to the Doge her representative, “My intellect staggers under the weight of a memory laden with surpassing favours. You received me into your house, did me honour, assisted me, protected me. You clothed yourself in my desires, and promoted them on every occasion; and this not only without having had of me any cause to honour me so highly, but even without having ever seen me.” He feels he cannot better discharge the burden of his gratitude than by shaping some of the emotions inspired in him by his visit to the Arsenal. There is a touch of sympathy and sometimes even a touch of truth and insight under the extravagantly symbolic garb of his appreciation. “Admiring first of all an immense number of porticoes, where as in vast maternal wombs I saw in embryo the galleys whose bodies were being framed, I realised that I was in the country of vessels, the fatherland of galleons, and that those masses were so formidable as to show themselves warriors even in their birth, fortifying themselves with countless nails and arming thus their very vitals with iron. I considered them as wandering islands, which, united, compose the continent of Venetian glory, the mainland of the rule of Christendom. I admired with joy the height of their masts and the size of their sailyards, and I called them forests under whose shade the Empire of the sea reposed and the hopes of the Catholic religion were fortified. And who, I said to myself, can deny that this Republic has subjugated the element of water, when none of her citizens can walk abroad, but that the water, as if vanquished, kisses his feet at every step?” Like all recorders of the glories of Venice, he is struck dumb at certain points by fear of the charge of fabling, but, collecting himself, he proceeds to speak of the trophies and relics, the rows of cuirasses, helmets and swords that remained as “iron memorials to arm the years against oblivion of Venetian greatness. What revolutions of the world, what accidents, what mutations of state, what lakes of tears and blood did not the dim lightnings of those fierce habiliments present to the eye of the observer?... I saw the remains of the Venetian fleet, vessels, that, as old men, weighted no less with years than glory, reposed under the magnificence of the arches which might well be called triumphal arches. I saw part of those galleons to which Christianity confesses the debt of her preservation.... And last, I saw below the water so great a quantity of the planks from which