From Padua came the largest stream of emigrants.  They left the tomb of their mythical ancestor, Antenor, and built their humble dwellings upon the islands of the rivers Altus and Methamaucus, better known to us as Rialto and Malamocco.  This Paduan settlement was one day to be known to the world by the name of Venice.  But let us not suppose that the future “Queen of the Adriatic” sprang into existence at a single bound like Constantinople or Alexandria.  For two hundred and fifty years, that is to say for eight generations, the refugees on the islands of the Adriatic prolonged an obscure and squalid existence—­fishing, salt manufacturing, damming out the waves with wattled vine-branches, driving piles into the sand-banks, and thus gradually extending the area of their villages.  Still these were but fishing villages, loosely confederated together, loosely governed, poor and insignificant, so that the anonymous geographer of Ravenna, writing in the seventh century, can only say of them, “In the country of Venetia there are some few islands which are inhabited by men.”  This seems to have been their condition, though perhaps gradually growing in commercial importance, until at the beginning of the eighth century the concentration of political authority in the hands of the first doge, and the recognition of the Rialto cluster of islands as the capital of the confederacy, started the republic on a career of success and victory, in which for seven centuries she met no lasting check.

But this lies far beyond the limit of our present subject.  It must be again said that we have not to think of “the pleasant place of all festivity,” but of a few huts among the sand-banks, inhabited by Roman provincials, who mournfully recall their charred and ruined habitations by the Brenta and the Piave.  The sea alone does not constitute their safety.  If that were all, the pirate ships of the Vandal Genseric might repeat upon their poor dwellings all the terror of Attila.  But it is in their amphibious life, in that strange blending of land and sea which is exhibited by the lagunes, that their safety lies.  Only experienced pilots can guide a vessel of any considerable draught through the mazy channels of deep water which intersect these lagoons; and should they seem to be in imminent peril from the approach of an enemy, they will defend themselves not like the Dutch by cutting the dikes which barricade them from the ocean, but by pulling up the poles which even those pilots need to indicate their pathway through the waters.  There, then, engaged in their humble, beaver-like labors, we leave for the present the Venetian refugees from the rage of Attila.