complained that they were not permitted to arm against the French.  The Austrian generals industriously circulated the most sinister reports respecting the armies of the Sombre-et-Meuse and the Rhine, and the position of the French troops in the Tyrol.  These impostures, printed in bulletins, were well calculated to instigate the Italians, and especially the Venetians, to rise in mass to exterminate the French, when the victorious army should penetrate into the Hereditary States.

The pursuit of the Archduke Charles into the heart of Austria encouraged the hopes which the Venetian Senate had conceived, that it would be easy to annihilate the feeble remnant of the French army, as the troops were scattered through the States of Venice on the mainland.  Wherever the Senate had the ascendency, insurrection was secretly fomented; wherever the influence of the patriots prevailed, ardent efforts were made to unite the Venetian terra firma to the Lombard Republic.

Bonaparte skillfully took advantage of the disturbances, and the massacres consequent on them, to adopt towards the Senate the tone of an offended conqueror.  He published a declaration that the Venetian Government was the most treacherous imaginable.  The weakness and cruel hypocrisy of the Senate facilitated the plan he had conceived of making a peace for France at the expense of the Venetian Republic.  On returning from Leoben, a conqueror and pacificator, he, without ceremony, took possession of Venice, changed the established government, and, master of all the Venetian territory, found himself, in the negotiations of Campo Formio, able to dispose of it as he pleased, as a compensation for the cessions which had been exacted from Austria.  After the 19th of May he wrote to the Directory that one of the objects of his treaty with Venice was to avoid bringing upon us the odium of violating the preliminaries relative to the Venetian territory, and, at the same time, to afford pretexts and to facilitate their execution.

At Campo Formio the fate of this republic was decided.  It disappeared from the number of States without effort or noise.  The silence of its fall astonished imaginations warmed by historical recollections from the brilliant pages of its maritime glory.  Its power, however, which had been silently undermined, existed no longer except in the prestige of those recollections.  What resistance could it have opposed to the man destined to change the face of all Europe?