In 1797 the expected favourable moment had arrived.  The knell of Venice was rung; and Bonaparte thus wrote to the Directory on the 30th of April:  “I am convinced that the only course to be now taken is to destroy this ferocious and sanguinary Government.”  On the 3d of May, writing from Palma Nuova, he says:  “I see nothing that can be done but to obliterate the Venetian name from the face of the globe.”

Towards the end of March 1797 the Government of Venice was in a desperate state.  Ottolini, the Podesta of Bergamo, an instrument of tyranny in the hands of the State inquisitors, then harassed the people of Bergamo and Brescia, who, after the reduction of Mantua, wished to be separated from Venice.  He drew up, to be sent to the Senate, a long report respecting the plans of separation, founded on information given him by a Roman advocate, named Marcelin Serpini; who pretended to have gleaned the facts he communicated in conversation with officers of the French army.  The plan of the patriotic party was, to unite the Venetian territories on the mainland with Lombardy, and to form of the whole one republic.  The conduct of Ottolini exasperated the party inimical to Venice, and augmented the prevailing discontent.  Having disguised his valet as a peasant, he sent him off to Venice with the report he had drawn up on Serpini’s communications, and other information; but this report never reached the inquisitors.  The valet was arrested, his despatches taken, and Ottolini fled from Bergamo.  This gave a beginning to the general rising of the Venetian States.  In fact, the force of circumstances alone brought on the insurrection of those territories against their old insular government.  General La Hoz, who commanded the Lombard Legion, was the active protector of the revolution, which certainly had its origin more in the progress of the prevailing principles of liberty than in the crooked policy of the Senate of Venice.  Bonaparte, indeed, in his despatches to the Directory, stated that the Senate had instigated the insurrection; but that was not quite correct, and he could not wholly believe his own assertion.

Pending the vacillation of the Venetian Senate, Vienna was exciting the population of its States on the mainland to rise against the French.  The Venetian Government had always exhibited an extreme aversion to the French Revolution, which had been violently condemned at Venice.  Hatred of the French had been constantly excited and encouraged, and religious fanaticism had inflamed many persons of consequence in the country.  From the end of 1796 the Venetian Senate secretly continued its armaments, and the whole conduct of that Government announced intentions which have been called perfidious, but the only object of which was to defeat intentions still more perfidious.  The Senate was the irreconcilable enemy of the French Republic.  Excitement was carried to such a point that in many places the people