jealousies and vanities of a playwright and an actress, and when public appointments were controlled by the subtle influence of the boudoir and the drawing-room, and an ambitious and beautiful society lady was the central figure of Venetian life. It was the time of the fatuous masquerades and futile pomposities portrayed for us by Longhi, when the card table, the coffee house and the play were the absorbing interest of Venetian minds. But before she sinks into the deep night of subjection to Austria to rise again as a province of a free and united Italy,[61] a faint hue of naval splendour lights up the horizon. Soon after Goethe’s arrival in Venice in 1786 he ascended St Mark’s tower and under the bright noon-day sun saw a fleet of galleys and frigates lying off Lido. They were reinforcements for Tunis, where the last of the great Venetians, Angelo Emo, was fighting the Algerian pirates. Emo humbled the Bey of Tunis, cleared the seas, and died at Malta in 1792. Five years later Napoleon marched his battalions towards the lagoons and before the mere breath of his coming the Republic of Venice crumbled into dust. On May 16, 1797, for the first time in a thousand years the Realtine islands were trodden by the foot of a conqueror, and the hundred and twentieth Doge of Venice, handing his biretta to an attendant, said: “Take it away, we shall not want it again.” CHAPTER XII THE FINE ARTS AT VENICE _Masons--Painters--Glass-workers--Printers_ Some prefer the pure design: Give me my gorge of colour, glut of gold In a glory round the Virgin made for me! Titian’s the man, not monk Angelico Who traces you some timid chalky ghost That turns the church into a charnel. --_Browning._