HISTORY OF MARINE ARCHITECTURE;

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lives, and such miserable remnant as they were capable of collecting Out ofthe wreck of their fortunes, was the first object of their concern. Theyretired to a cluster of small islands, situated, as is well known, at the head ofthe Adriatic sea *, and this emigration, if the event could be said to deserve

that

* Mr. Gibbon gives the following interesting account of the origin of this people :—“ It is a sayingworthy of the ferocious pride of Alaric, that the grass never grew on the spot where his horse stood.Yet the savage destroyer, undesignedly, laid the foundation of a republic, which revived, in the feudalstate of Europe, the art and spirit of commercial industry. The celebrated name of Venice, or Venetia,was formerly diffused over a large and fertile province of Italy, from the confines of Pannonia, to theriver Addua, and from the Po to the Rhastian, and Julian Alps. Before the irruption of the barbarians,fifty Venetian cities flourished in peace and prosperity. Apuleia was placed in the most conspicuousstation, but the ancient dignity of Padua was supported by agriculture and manufactures ; and the pro-perty of five hundred citizens, who were entitled to the equestrian rank, must have amounted, at thestrictest computation, to one million seven hundred thousand pounds. Many families of Aquileia,Padua, and the adjacent towns, who fled from the sword of the Huns, found a safe though obscurerefuge in the neighbouring islands. At the extremity of the gulph where the Adriatic feebly imitatesthe tides of the ocean, near an hundred small islands are separated by shallow water from the continent,and protected from the waves by several long slips of land, which admit the entrance of vessels throughsome secret and narrow channels. Till the middle of the fifth century, these remote and sequesteredspots remained without cultivation, without inhabitants, and almost without a name ; but the mannersof the Venetian fugitives, their arts, and their government, were gradually formed by their new situa-tion ; and one of the epistles of Cassiodorus, which describes their condition about seventy years after-wards, may be considered as the primitive monument of the republic. The minister of Theodoriccompares them, in his quaint declamatory stile, to water fowl, who had fixed their nests in the bosomof the waves ; and though he allows that the Venetian provinces had formerly contained many noblefamilies, he insinuates, that they were now reduced by misfortune to the same level of humble poverty.Fish was the common, and almost universal food of every rank. Their only treasure consisted in theplenty of salt, which they extracted from the sea, and the exchange of that commodity, so essential tohuman life, was substituted in the neighbouring markets to the currency of gold and silver. A people*whose habitations might be doubtfully assigned to the earth or water, soon became alike familiar withthe two elements, and the demands of avarice succeeded to those of necessity. The islanders, whofrom Grado to Chiozza were intimately connected with each other, penetrated into the heart of Italyby the secure, though laborious navigation of the rivers and inland canals. Their vessels, which werecontinually encreasing in size and number, visited all the harbours of the gulph; and the marriagewhich Venice annually celebrates with the Hadriatic, was contracted in hef early infancy. The epistleof Cassiodorus is addressed to the military tribunes ; and he exhorts them, in a mild tone of authority,to animate the zeal of their countrymen for the public service, which required their assistance, totransport the magazines of wine and oil from the province of Istria to the roval city of Ravenna. Theambiguous office of these magistrates is explained by the tradition, that in the twelve principal islandstwelve tribunes or judges were created by annual and popular election. The existence of the Vene-tian republic, unaer the Gothic kingdom of Italy, is attested by the same authentic recofd, which anni-hilates their lofty claim of original and perpetual independance.”

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