Well did Sanudo answer that he would "give the sweat of his brow to no one." And then Bembo wrote from Padua, asking the Doge to compel Sanudo to open his collections to him. But at last the poor, slighted man did give his "sweat" to his unconscionable rival; and the result is much to his credit, for beside his animated and entertaining narrative Bembo's writing is as dry as desert sands. {325} Very late in his life the Ten gave him one hundred and fifty ducats a year as a recognition of his books,--"which I vow to God is nothing to the great labor they have cost me," as he remarks. Until within two and a half years of his death he continued his diaries; and as soon as he ceased to write them he made a will, in which he gave them bound and enclosed in a book-case to the Signoria, to be placed where they should think best. And now comes the most astounding fact. These treasures, which we should naturally think would have been placed with care and pride where they could be seen and consulted, were put no one knows where, and in 1805 were found in the Royal Library at Vienna, having got there nobody knows how! Sanudo's library and his collections of pictures and curiosities, from the celebrated _mappamondo_ to matters of slight importance and value, had become famous; and we are told that "the illustrious strangers who visited Venice in these days went away dissatisfied unless they had seen the Arsenal, the jewels of S. Marco, and the library of Sanudo." Sometimes they were forced to be "dissatisfied;" for the old historian grew weary of "illustrious persons," and said them nay with a will, when asked to display his collections. To him personally, while he had been greatly interested in all his _roba_, the books were the most precious, and at one time he had intended to make a gift of them to the library of S. Marco; but although long promised, this library was not begun. Sanudo was poor. He could not even reward Anna of Padua, who had served him faithfully for twenty years, and had not been paid. He also felt himself compelled to relinquish the marble sarcophagus in San Zaccaria, for which a previous will had provided; and so at last, he directed his executors to sell his collections, to pay the worthy Anna, to bury him "where {326} he falls," preserving only the epitaph which he had written to his great comfort. No one knows where he was laid; and not a word to his honor and remembrance existed in Venice until Mr. Rawdon Brown, who has rescued the name and works of Sanudo from oblivion, placed an inscription on his house, still standing, with the Sanudo arms upon it, behind the Fondaco dei Turchi (Museo Civico), in the parish of S. Giacomo dell' Orio. Mrs. Oliphant says:--