AUTHOR'S FOREWORD
I would take this opportunity of saying that, in two instances at least, the central idea of these stories is to be found in the history of Venice in the more dramatic years of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Few of those who remember Mr. Horatio F. Brown's delightful Venetian Studies will fail to recognise the alchemist Marcantonio Bragadin in my sketch of the charlatan Zuane de Franza. It is to be doubted if there is, in the whole story of chicanery, a more remarkable figure than that of Bragadino, whose ultimate exposure was in a measure due to the powerful sermons preached against him by Frà Paolo Sarpi. It has been my hope in these sketches to portray in Frà Giovanni, the Capuchin monk, something of that connection of idea which permitted a priest to wield so great an influence in a Republic which by no means loved priests. Nor do I think that the measure of authority here permitted to Frà Giovanni would have been denied to the great friar who won religious liberty for the Venetians.
For the story "A Miracle of Bells," the Spanish Conspiracy is my authority. It is curious that a church figured so often in the narratives of such plottings as these. The student will remember that a document hidden in a faldstool of the church of the Frari betrayed the Giambattista Bragadin to the police.
Elsewhere, for knowledge of the zanni of Venice, I am indebted to the widely-known memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi.
London,1899