And here, many years before, on Oct. 24, 1457, came the old Foscari to die. The new Doge was elected on the 31st; and on All Souls Day, when the new prince {184} went to San Marco to Mass, Foscari's son-in-law there announced that Foscari was no more. His funeral was magnificent. The new Doge was obliged to loan his crown to his predecessor, when he was laid in state in the palace from which he had been expelled but one short week before. Every honor was bestowed on him, dead, that the Republic could give. He was carried to the Frari, with many tapers lighting his way; and, to quote Mrs. Oliphant, "there he lies under a weight of sculptured marble, his sufferings all over for five hundred years and more; but never the story of his greatness, his wrongs, and sorrows, which last gave him such claims upon the recollection of mankind as no magnificence nor triumph can bestow." When the bell rang At dawn, announcing a new Doge to Venice, It found him on his knees before the Cross, Clasping his aged hands in earnest prayer; And there he died. Ere half its task was done, It rang his knell. ROGERS. So intense was the excitement in Venice, caused by the deposition and death of the old Doge, that the Senate forbade "the affair of Francesco Foscari to be mentioned on pain of death." FRANCESCO CARMAGNOLA. The story of Jacopo Foscari affords a striking commentary upon the changes which had come over the armies of the Republic. It would seem that the want of any serious and engrossing occupation--a sort of elegant idleness--had led Jacopo to his misfortunes; and this idleness would not have been possible during so stirring a period as that of his father's reign, if the Venetians had still done their own fighting as they did it in the reign of Enrico Dandolo. {185} In Foscari's day it had come to be the custom, all over Italy and in other countries of Europe, to hire men to kill and be killed for money. Mercenary troops they were fitly called; for they not only received their hire, but they robbed the peasant of his harvest, and from the wealthy land-owner they extorted gold. Venice had employed these bands when they were made up of Bretons, Hungarians, Gascons, and other men, who spoke no Italian, and thought solely of gain; but by the middle of the fifteenth century the Free Lances had come to be an organized institution, with unwritten laws, which were well understood by them and by their employers; and the general or leader of these bands who was not successful was in much danger of having his head taken off by the Seigneur or the government he served, on the charge of treason. A most famous leader of one of these bands of _condottieri_ was Francesco Carmagnola.