Of course it is not easy for a stranger in a very different social position to feel that he has been admitted to their confidence.  Italians have an ineradicable habit of making themselves externally agreeable, of bending in all indifferent matters to the whims and wishes of superiors, and of saying what they think Signori like.  This habit, while it smoothes the surface of existence, raises up a barrier of compliment and partial insincerity, against which the more downright natures of us Northern folk break in vain efforts.  Our advances are met with an imperceptible but impermeable resistance by the very people who are bent on making the world pleasant to us.  It is the very reverse of that dour opposition which a Lowland Scot or a North English peasant offers to familiarity; but it is hardly less insurmountable.  The treatment, again, which Venetians of the lower class have received through centuries from their own nobility, makes attempts at fraternisation on the part of gentlemen unintelligible to them.  The best way, here and elsewhere, of overcoming these obstacles is to have some bond of work or interest in common—­of service on the one side rendered, and goodwill on the other honestly displayed.  The men of whom I have been speaking will, I am convinced, not shirk their share of duty or make unreasonable claims upon the generosity of their employers.

* * * * *

A CINQUE CENTO BRUTUS

I.—­THE SESTIERE DI SAN POLO

There is a quarter of Venice not much visited by tourists, lying as it does outside their beat, away from the Rialto, at a considerable distance from the Frari and San Rocco, in what might almost pass for a city separated by a hundred miles from the Piazza.  This is the quarter of San Polo, one corner of which, somewhere between the back of the Palazzo Foscari and the Campo di San Polo, was the scene of a memorable act of vengeance in the year 1546.  Here Lorenzino de’ Medici, the murderer of his cousin Alessandro, was at last tracked down and put to death by paid cut-throats.  How they succeeded in their purpose, we know in every detail from the narrative dictated by the chief assassin.  His story so curiously illustrates the conditions of life in Italy three centuries ago, that I have thought it worthy of abridgment.  But, in order to make it intelligible, and to paint the manners of the times more fully, I must first relate the series of events which led to Lorenzino’s murder of his cousin Alessandro, and from that to his own subsequent assassination.  Lorenzino de’ Medici, the Florentine Brutus of the sixteenth century, is the hero of the tragedy.  Some of his relatives, however, must first appear upon the scene before he enters with a patriot’s knife concealed beneath a court-fool’s bauble.

II.—­THE MURDER OF IPPOLITO DE’ MEDICI