But she had not the inspiration of Florence, her
art, her literature; the dialect in which she uttered herself is harsh
and crabbed, and no poet known beyond it has breathed his soul into it;
her architecture was first the Gothic from over the Alps, and then of
the Renaissance which built the palaces of her merchants in a giant bulk
and of a brutal grandeur. She had not the political genius of Venice,
the oligarchic instinct of self-preservation from popular misgovernment
and princely aggression. Her story is the usual Italian story of a
people jealous of each other, and, in their fear of a native tyrant,
impatiently calling in one foreign tyrant after another and then
furiously expelling him. When she would govern herself, she first made
her elective chief magistrate Doge for life, and then for two years;
under both forms she submitted and rebelled at will from 1359 till 1802,
when, after having accepted the French notion of freedom from Bonaparte,
she enjoyed a lion's share of his vicissitudes.
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