enter into their scheme. They traded on curiosity, greed, credulity, on the weaknesses of their contemporaries. They intended to make for each day sufficient for each day's needs. Their skill consisted in playing with circumstances, in combining or counterposing the people with whom they came in contact. The excitement of the game was its own sufficient reward. It did not matter that it was a game which could have one issue only-failure in the end.

CATERINA CORNARO, QUEEN OF CYPRUS.

IT is of Caterina Cornaro, lady of Asolo, queen of Jerusalem, Cyprus, and Armenia, that we have to speak : a daughter of Venice, born in that heyday of Venetian splendour, the close of the fifteenth century and the opening years of the sixteenth. The lust of the eye and the pride of life, the confident, unhesitating assertion of sensuous emotion, were declaring themselves as principles of being; the flower of pleasurable existence was breaking from bud to blossom, to ripen later and fall in that Dead Sea fruit of seventeenthcentury corruption. Venice had won her wealth; she was turning now to the use of it; baring her bosom to the joyous and seductive air, blown from the distant salt sea, bright yet soothing, languid and caressing, penetrating and pervading all with its magical perfume, that stirred the soul and drew it to a very ocean of rapturous delight. She opened her heart and throbbed to the sweetness and love of her sea-girt home; she opened her eyes and drank the changeful symphonies of colour that, morning and evening, flamed upon her water-ways. Her artists caught upon their palettes the reflection of sunsets seen from the Zattere, and laid with free hand this glow upon their canvases;

while the golden glory of Venetian women grew there, large like their skies, soft and undulating as their ocean floor, clear as the morning light, aureoled with hair of midday splendour, robed in a colour that was learned from their sunsets. "Spartam nactus es ; hanc orna." Venice had asked for no Arcadia; her little Sparta of the mud islands she had claimed, held, made beautiful; and now, should she not enjoy it?

If we wish to know what the women of this ample Venetian life looked like, we must turn to the pictures of Titian. There, in his Venus of the tribune, largelimbed and golden on the white sheets, or in his Flora with full breasts and down-hanging hair, or, higher and better still, in his Madonna of the ecstatic, upraised face, with arms outstretched and breezelifted locks, ecstatic, it is true, but not with any superterrestrial ecstasy—there it is that we shall find them. But should we desire to learn what these women were, not in body only, but in heart and mind; if it be their daily life we wish to scrutinize, to see them in their homes about their business—we are left but poorly off, and have to be content with such scraps of knowledge and such inward glimpses as may be caught from the comedies of their day, or from the few Venetian novelettes of Bandello and his brother raconteurs.

One thing is clear about their manner of living; this wide luxury, this abundant life, was not for all the women of Venice. A curious calculation * has been made, from which it would seem that, out of seven hundred noble ladies, not more than sixty or seventy Yriarte, “La Vie d'un Patricien de Venise” (Paris: 1874),

cap. ii.

were in the habit of appearing daily in public; the others remained close shut in their houses, except upon festivals and great public functions. It was the courtesans who freely used and freely enjoyed the diurnal splendour of Venetian habit. They were always en evidence, present on the piazza; their gondolas to be met out on the lagoons, by San Spirito or the Lido; their liveries became well known; their doings and their sayings were the subject of the people's gossip; round them the popular interest settled. The great ladies remained, for the most part, a shadow and a name; they were seen once or twice, perhaps, in the year, upon one of those state ceremonies when the noble houses vied with each other in the wealth of jewellery and the richness of the robes worn by their gentildonne. But even on such occasions as a ball in the ducal palace, given to some wandering prince, the courtesans held their own, and the more renowned among them were sure of invitations, though, at times like this, the Venetian nobleman took care that, in splendour of dress at least, his mistress should not eclipse his wife. It was a free and brilliant life that these women led; they affected a gorgeousness of dress -rich coloured silks or velvets or Eastern stuffs-which distinguished them from the noble lady whose everyday wear was the long and simple black silk cappa. Their houses were furnished to the furthest point the sumptuary laws would allow. If a Venetian gentleman desired conversation, wit, music, even such politics as the vigilance of the Three permitted-all, in short, that we mean by a salon—it was to their drawingrooms that he had to go. It was there, and not in

his own house, that he would meet Titian and Sansovino the architect; or, if he desired a lampoon on his foe, Pietro Aretino, with his daughters Adria and Austria. Venice was tuned to a high note of pleasure, and the atmosphere of these drawing-rooms was calculated to delight a trained sensibility; for many of the women were greatly accomplished - fine musicians; brilliant talkers; sometimes, like Veronica Franco, skilled writers of the sonnet and that curious polished verse which says so little and says it so beautifully.

Very different was the lot of the noble ladies. They lived from their girlhood in an Eastern seclusion; as carefully and as jealously shut away as though they were the inmates of some Turkish seraglio. The Venetian men had imbibed their views on domestic matters from the East; in every department that which touched them intimately was coloured from Byzantium; their deepest-rooted instincts, habits and forms were Oriental. They did not keep eunuchs as a guard upon their women, it is true; but they had a hundred jealous eyes always on the watch, and no Venetian would think of leaving home for long without a word to some more trusted servant.* At all events, they took advantage of one fashion in favour among Venetian ladies, and by flattery they induced them to wear a veritable instrument of torture which prevented them from straying far afield; pattens of an enormous size were in vogue, and the mania for increasing the height grew, until at length

The Arsenal museum affords a proof of the extent to which this brutal and insulting suspicion could be carried.