“Whoever you are, Aldo requesteth you, if you want anything, to ask it in few words and depart; unless, like Hercules, you come to lend the aid of your shoulders to the weary Atlas.  There will always be found, in that case something for you to do, however many you may be.”  But in this Aldine mansion only the most-learned men of letters gathered, and Greek was the sole language permitted in its discussions.

One of the habitues of the Aldine Club was chief among this noble company of the Morosini.  He was a grave, scholarly man who listened and questioned much out of a seemingly inexhaustible fund of historic, legal, and ecclesiastical knowledge—­a man who had the power of stimulating others, and whose rare word, when uttered, was of value.  He had opinions gathered at first hand from influential minds of every land and creed to contribute to the talk when it flowed in narrowing channels; and he himself came thither for refreshment from abstruse studies, out of a quiet cell in the convent of the Servi, while seemingly unaware that many a stranger begged for an invitation to the palazzo Morosini in the hope of an introduction to this “miracle of Venice.”

Perhaps this grave friar, apparently so careless of his distinction, was the unsuspected intellectual thread which bound, as it were, together the various influential circles of Venice; for in every centre, plebeian or patrician, where there was anything new to be mooted or anything of value to be discussed, he was a visitor so welcome and so frequent that he might well have exerted a steady, unifying influence upon Venetian thought.

At the sign of the “Nave d’oro,” in the Merceria, where the vast commercial interests of Venice were the absorbing theme, and strangers from every clime and merchants just returned from distant ports were eager now, as in the days when Marco Polo had so valiantly entertained the goodly company, to rehearse the tale of their adventures—­it was neither merchant nor noble who stood forth on the bizarre background of brilliant baubles and gold-woven tissues as the centre of this ridotto, but a friar, learned in languages and sciences, of whom it was pleasantly affirmed that “he was the only man in Venice who could discuss any subject in any tongue!”

As this friar, unattended and on foot, turned out of the narrow calle from San Samuele into the Campo San Stefano, the Giustiniani, father and son, were just landing from their gondolas in the midst of a gay retinue, on the steps of the palazzo Morosini; other gondolas of other nobles were floating in full moonlight before the quay; and to Fra Paolo, who did not share the Venetian love of color and of art, the elaborately frescoed facade of an opposite palace—­an extravagant freak of the Veronese’s which the Venetians were already beginning to cherish as the work of their great artist who would paint no more—­seemed an impertinence unworthy of that dazzling illumination.