he attended at those councils of state which unmasked the conspiracy, known as Bedmar’s, to destroy Venice.  In his early manhood Cyprus had been wrested from the hands of S. Mark; and inasmuch as the Venetians alone sustained the cause of Christian civilization against Turk and pirate in the Eastern seas, he was able before his death to anticipate the ruin which the war of Candia subsequently brought upon his country.  During the last eighteen years of his existence Sarpi was the intellect of the Republic; the man of will and mind who gave voice and vigor to her policy of independence; the statesman who most clearly penetrated the conditions of her strength and weakness.  This friar incarnated the Venetian spirit at a moment when, upon the verge of decadence, it had attained self-consciousness; and so instinctively devoted are Venetians to their State that in his lifetime he was recognized by them as hero, and after his death venerated as saint.

No sooner had the dispute with Paul V. been compromised, than Sarpi noticed how the aristocracy of Venice yielded themselves to sloth and political indifference.  The religious obsequiousness to Rome and the ‘peace or rather cowardice of slaves,’ which were gradually immersing Italy in mental torpor and luxurious idleness, invaded this last stronghold of freedom.  Though Sarpi’s Christian Stoicism and practical sagacity saved him from playing the then futile part of public agitator, his private correspondence shows how low his hope had sunk for Italy.  Nothing but a general war could free her from the yoke of arrogant Rome and foreign despotism.  Meanwhile the Papal Court, Spain and the House of Austria, having everything to lose by contest, preserved the peace of Italy at any cost.  Princes whose petty thrones depended on Spanish and Papal good-will, dreaded to disturb the equilibrium of servitude; the population, dulled by superstition, emasculated by Jesuitical corruption and intimidated by Church tyranny, slumbered in the gross mud-honey of slavish pleasures.  From his cell in the convent of the Servites Sarpi swept the whole political horizon, eagerly anticipating some dawn-star of deliverance.  At one time his eyes rested on the Duke of Savoy, but that unquiet spirit failed to steer his course clear between Spanish and French interests, Roman jealousies, and the ill-concealed hostilities of Italian potentates.  At another time, like all lovers of freedom throughout Europe, he looked with confidence to Henri IV.  But a fanatic’s dagger, sharpened by the Jesuits, cut short the monarch’s life and gave up France to the government of astute Florentine adventurers.  Germany was too distracted by internal dissensions, Holland too distant and preoccupied with her own struggle for existence, to offer immediate aid.  It was in vain that Sarpi told his foreign correspondents that the war of liberty in Europe must be carried into the stronghold of absolutism.  To secure a victory over the triple forces of Spain, the Papal