and informers by profession—­who wore the liveries of noble families whose secrets they would unhesitatingly consign to that merciless Bocca del Leone, for favor or vengeance of those they secretly served.  For underneath the glitter and the pomp of these latter days of Venice—­its presage of decay—­a turbulent mass of malcontents, foreigners disappointed in intrigue, Venetians shut out from power, grasped and plotted for its semblance,—­sold murder for gold, treason for gold,—­escaping justice by the wiles they so deftly unveiled, or by the importance of the deposition it was in their power to make.  Secret, swift, relentless, absolute—­Venice had work for men who did not court the sunlight; and such a nucleus drew to its dark centre intriguers from other courts, and gathered in and strengthened the worthless within its own borders, until the evil was growing heavy to deal with.

Causes of discontent between Church and State were alarmingly on the increase; and while in no other dominion, save that of Rome alone, were ecclesiastical possessions so rich, or their establishments more splendid than at Venice, nowhere were the lines of power so jealously defined and guarded as in the government of this Republic from which ecclesiastics were rigorously excluded,—­although no least ceremonial was held complete without the presence of the Patriarch and priests who evidenced the devotion of Venice to the Holy Mother Church,—­though every parish kept its festa, and the religion of Venice was an essential part of the life of its people.  But if the priests had no visible seat in the splendid Council Chambers of the Republic, they boasted at Rome that their sway over the consciences of these lordly senators was well established by virtue of the confessional and that, in the event of contest, there would be many votes for Rome.

The ridotti, the informal clubs of Venice in those days, were important centres of influence—­political, legislative, and literary; and there was a certain palazzo Morosini, well known to many of the senators who gathered in the Broglio, where questions of vital interest to the thinkers and rulers of Venice were discussed with the degree of knowledge that might have been expected from so eminent a company as that which made the home of the distinguished senator Andrea Morosini the scene of its ridotto, and where freedom of speech was much greater than seemed wise in the candid sunshine of the Piazza.

Of its present numbers all, at some period of their lives, held high office under the Republic—­they were senators, secretaries of state, ambassadors—­and three among that little group of thirty lived to wear the beretta.  It represented essentially the patrician culture of Venice, and Morosini himself was already eminent as an historian; but the chief literary centre was still acknowledged to be that quaint house in Campo Agostino, of Aldo Manuzio, il vecchio, bearing, as in his day, shield-wise, its forbidding inscription,