Page:The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero) - Volume 2.djvu/376

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CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE.
[CANTO IV.

XIII.

Before St. Mark still glow his Steeds of brass,
Their gilded collars glittering in the sun;
But is not Doria's menace[1] come to pass?N6
Are they not bridled?—Venice, lost and won,
Her thirteen hundred years of freedom done,
Sinks, like a sea-weed, unto whence she rose![2][3]

    Troyes, the Paradise and the Pilgrim, were the first which grappled with the Towers of Constantinople [April, 1204].... The bishops of Soissons and of Troyes would have placed the blind old Doge Dandolo on the imperial throne; his election was opposed by the Venetians.... But probably the wise patriotism of Dandolo himself, and his knowledge of the Venetian mind, would make him acquiesce in the loss of an honour so dangerous to his country.... Venice might have sunk to an outpost, as it were, of the Eastern Empire."—Milman's Hist, of Lat. Christianity, v. 350, 353, 354.]

  1. [Hobhouse's version (see Hist. Notes, No. vi.) of the war of Chioggia is not borne out by modern research. For example, the long speech which Chinazzo attributes to the Genoese admiral, Pietro Doria, is probably mythical. The actual menace of the "bitting and bridling the horses of St. Mark" is assigned by other historians to Francesco Carrara. Doria was not killed by a stone bullet from the cannon named The Trevisara, but by the fall of the Campanile in Chioggia, which had been struck by the bullet. (Venice, an Historical Sketch of the Republic, by Horatio F. Brown, 1893, pp. 225-234.)]
  2. ——into whence she rose.—[Editions 1818-1891.]
  3. [Compare the opening lines of Byron's Ode on Venice

    "Oh Venice! Venice! when thy marble walls
    Are level with the waters, there shall be
    A cry of nations o'er thy sunken halls,
    A loud lament along the sweeping sea!"

    Shelley, too, in his Lines written among the Euganean Hills, bewailed the approaching doom of the "sea-girt city." But threatened cities, like threatened men, live long, and