Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. III.djvu/372

346 WARS AND POLITICS OF ITALY. PART II. were left on the field, and a large number of pris- oners, including many of rank, with all the baggage arid artillery, fell into the hands of the victors.^' Thus ended the campaign of 1513; the French driven again beyond the mountains ; Venice cooped up within her sea-girt fastnesses, and compelled to enrol her artisans and common laborers in her de- fence, — but still strong in resources, above all in the patriotism and unconquerable spirit of her people. ^^ 31 Guicciardini, Istoria, torn. vi. lib. 11, pp. 101-138. — Peter Mar- tyr, Opus Epist., epist. 523. — Ma- riana, Hist, de Espafia, torn. ii. lib. 30, cap. 21. — Fleurange, M^- moires, chap. 36, 37. — Also an original letter of King Ferdinand to Archbishop Deza, apud Bemaldez, Reyes Catolicos, MS., cap. 242. Alviano died a little more than a year after this defeat, at sixty years of age. He was so much beloved by the soldiery, that they refused to be separated from his remains, which were borne at the head of the army for some weeks after his death. They were finally laid in the church of St. Stephen in Ven- ice ; and the senate, with more gratitude than is usually conceded to republics, settled an honorable pension on his family. 32 Daru, Hist, de Venise, torn, iii. pp. 615, 616. l)aru"s His- loire de Ve- nise. Count Daru has supplied the de- sideratum, so long standing, of a full, authentic history of a state, whose institutions were the admi- ration of earlier times, and whose long stability and success make them deservedly an object of curi- osity and interest to our own. The style of the work, at once lively and condensed, is not that best suited to historic writing, being of the piquant, epigrammatic kind, much affected by French writers. The subject, too, of the revolutions of empire, does not afford room for the dramatic interest, attaching to works which admit of more ex- tended biographical developement. Abundant interest will be found, however, in the dexterity with which he has disentangled the tor- tuous politics of the republic ; in the acute and always sensible re- flections with which he clothes the dry skeleton of fact ; and in the novel stores of information he has opened. The foreign policy of Venice excited too much interest among friends and enemies in the day of her glory, not to occupy the pens of the most intelligent writers. But no Italian chronicler, not even one intrusted with the office by the government itself, has been able to exhibit the interior workings of the complicated machinery so sat- isfactorily as M. Daru has done, with the aid of those voluminous state papers, which were as jeal- ously guarded from inspection, until the downfall of the republic, as the records of the Spanish Inquisition .