barge, all carven outside with the dumpling loves and loose nymphs of the
period, with fruits, and flowers, and what not; and within, luxuriously
cushioned and furnished, and stocked with good things for pleasure making
in the gross old fashion. [Footnote: Mutinelli, _Gli Ultimi Cinquant'
Anni della Repubblica di Veneza_.] King Cole was not a merrier old soul than
Illustrissimo of that day; he outspent princes; and his agent, while he
harried the tenants to supply his master's demands, plundered
Illustrissimo frightfully. Illustrissimo never looked at accounts. He said
to his steward, "_Caro veccio, fe vu. Mi remeto a quel che fe vu._"
(Old fellow, you attend to it. I shall be satisfied with what you do.) So
the poor agent had no other course but to swindle him, which he did; and
Illustrissimo, when he died, died poor, and left his lordly debts and
vices to his sons.

In Venice, the noble still lives sometimes in his ancestral palace, dimly
occupying the halls where his forefathers flourished in so much splendor.
I can conceive, indeed, of no state of things more flattering to human
pride than that which surrounded the patrician of the old aristocratic
Republic. The house in which he dwelt was the palace of a king, in luxury
of appointment and magnificence of size. Troops of servants that
ministered to his state peopled its vast extent; and the gondolas that
carried his grandeur abroad were moored in little fleets to the piles that
rose before his palace, painted with the family arms and colors. The
palace itself stood usually on the Grand Canal, and rose sheer from the
water, giving the noble that haughty inaccessibility which the lord of the
main-land achieved only by building lofty walls and multiplying gates. The
architecture was as costly in its ornament as wild Gothic fancy, or
Renaissance luxury of bad taste, could make it; and when the palace front
was not of sculptured marble, the painter's pencil filled it with the
delight of color. The main-land noble's house was half a fortress, and