Rialto and instruct the people in their political rights and duties for
four hours; and even when the duties became every thing and the rights
nothing (after the Serrar del Consiglio), the friendly habit of daily
intercourse between patricians and citizens was still kept up at the same
place. Once each week, and on every holiday, the noble took his seat in
the Grand Council (the most august assembly in the world, without doubt),
or the Ten, or the Three, according to his office in the State,--holding
his place in the Council by right of birth, and in the other bodies by
election of his peers.

Although the patricians were kept as one family apart from the people, and
jealously guarded in their aristocratic purity by the State, they were
only equals of the poorest before the laws of their own creation, and
their condescension to the people was frequent and great. Indeed, the
Venetians of all classes are social creatures, loving talk and gossip, and
these constant habits of intercourse must have done much to produce that
equality of manner now observable in them. Their amusements were for a
long time the same, the nobles taking part in the public holidays, and in
the popular exercises of rowing and swimming. In the earlier times,
hunting in the lagoons was a favorite diversion; but as the decay of the
Republic advanced, and the patrician blossomed into the fine gentleman of
the last century, these hearty sports were relinquished, and every thing
was voted vulgar but masking in carnival, dancing and gaming at Ridotto,
and intriguing everywhere.

The accounts which Venetian writers give of Republican society in the
eighteenth century form a _chronique scandaleuse_ which need not be
minutely copied here. Much may be learned of Venetian manners of this time
from the comedies of Goldoni; and the faithlessness of society may be
argued from the fact that in these plays, which contain nothing salacious