When we consider the literature of Venice, we are amazed to find how few names are in its list of authors, and how narrow the field they occupied. Of poets there were none; and, indeed, the only writers of importance were the early annalists and the later historians. That peculiarly self-centred trait of which we have spoken as belonging to the Venetians in various directions, was eminently characteristic of their writers. It was Venice, and only Venice, that interested them; and from its earliest days there were those, nameless now, who were so impressed with the growth, the strength, and the splendor of the city that they saw growing and spreading around them, that they wrote it all down, and thus furnished invaluable material to those who came after them and wrote in a more elegant and systematic style. Some of these early annals still exist. They are read by the learned, and are said to be a strange medley of history and fable, all expressed in language of such vigor as to emphasize the earnestness of the writers, and frequently with such realism as would eclipse the authors of our day who cultivate that quality. His Serenity Marco Foscarini, in his work on Venetian literature, gives the names of such a host of these imperceptible writers, who are more than half lost in the ancient fogs in which they existed, that one must be brave even to read these names, much more so to attempt their works. {320} Sagornino, of the eleventh century, is more real; and no aspect in which Venice could be viewed was neglected by him and his followers. Its ceremonials, treaties, ecclesiastical and other important matters, are treated with no more attention and respect than are the merest details and most common events. They were all lovers of this mistress, Venezia, to whom the slightest variation in her pulse was almost a matter of life and death. But not until the fourteenth century were these chronicles put into a form which could be called history. Andrea Dandolo, Petrarch's friend, the first scholarly Doge, may also be called the first Venetian historian. His family had already given three Doges to the Republic, and he had not only the early annals, but the state papers and those of his ancestors, on which to rely for the facts which he wove into a formal, dignified, and conscientious narration of the lives and deeds of the rulers of Venice who had preceded him.