VENDEMIAIRE (vintage month), the first month of the French Revolution year, from 22nd September to 21st October.
VENDETTA, the practice which existed in Corsica and Sicily on the part of individuals of exacting vengeance for the murder of a relative on the murderer or one of his relations.
VENDOME, LOUISE JOSEPH, DUC DE, French general, born at Paris, great-grandson of Henry IV.; served in the wars of Louis XIV., and gained several victories; was defeated by Marlborough and Prince Eugene at Oudenarde in 1708, but by his victory at Villaviciosa contributed to the restoration of Philip V. to the Spanish throne in 1711; was a man of gross sensuality, and has been pilloried by Saint Simon for the execration of all mankind (1654-1712).
VENEZUELA (2,323), a federal republic in South America, founded in 1830, over three times as large as Spain, consisting of nine States and several territories; composed of mountain and valley, and in great part of llanos, within the basin of the Orinoco; between the Caribbean Sea, Colombo, Brazil, and British Guiana, and containing a population of Indian, Spanish, and Negro descent; on the llanos large herds of horses and cattle are reared; the agricultural products are sugar, coffee, cotton, tobacco, &c.; the forests yield mahogany, ebony, and dye-wood, while the mines yield iron, copper, &c., and there are extensive gold-fields, considered the richest in the world; the boundary line between the British colony and Venezuela was for long matter of keen dispute, but by the intervention of the United States at the request of the latter a treaty between the contending parties was concluded, referring the matter to a court of arbitration, which met at Paris in 1895, and settled it in 1899, in vindication, happily, of the British claim, the Schomburgk line being now declared to be the true line, and the gold-fields ours.
VENGEUR, LE, a war-vessel of the French fabled to have gone down rather than surrender to the English in a battle off Ushant on 1st June 1794, the crew shouting “Vive la Republique,” when it was really a cry for help.
VENICE, a city of Italy, in a province of the same name, at the head of the Adriatic, in a shallow lagoon dotted with some eighty islets, and built on piles partly of wood and partly of stone, the streets of which are canals traversed by gondolas and crossed here and there by bridges; the city dates from the year 432, when the islands were a place of refuge from the attacks of the Huns, and took shape as an independent State with magistrates of its own about 687, to assume at length the form of a republic and become “Queen of the Adriatic Sea,” the doge, or chief magistrate, ranking as one of the sovereign powers of the Western world; from its situation it became in the 10th century a great centre of trade with the East, and continued to be till the discovery of the route round the Cape, after which it began to decline, till it fell eventually under the yoke of Austria, from which it was wrested in 1866, and is now part of the modern kingdom of Italy, with much still to show of what it was in its palmy days, and indications of a measure of recovery from its down-trodden state; for an interesting and significant sketch in brief of its rise and fall see the “SHADOW ON THE DIAL” in Ruskin’s “St. Mark’s Rest.”