In the naval arsenals of Spain,çoisRené England, France, Holland, one sees only that which is connected with the objects of those arsenals; in Venice, the arts are allied to industry. The monument to Admiral Emo[111], by Canova, awaits you beside the carcass of a ship; rows of guns meet your eye through long porticoes: the two colossal lions from the Piræus keep the gate of the dock from which a frigate is about to issue for a world which Athens did not know and which was discovered by the genius of modern Italy.
In spite of those fine remains of Neptune, the Arsenal no longer recalls those lines of Dante:
In the Venetians' arsenal as boils Through wintry months tenacious pitch, to smear Their unsound vessels; for the inclement time Sea-faring men restrains, and in that while His bark one builds anew, another stops The ribs of his that hath made many a voyage, One hammers at the prow, one at the poop, This shapeth oars, that other cables twirls, The mizen one repairs, and main-sail rent[112].
All this animation is over: the emptiness of seven-eighths of the arsenal, the extinct furnaces, the boilers gnawed with rust, the rope-walks without wheels, the dock-yards without shipwrights bear witness to the same death that has smitten the palaces. Instead of the throng of carpenters, sail-makers, seamen, caulkers, ship's lads, one sees a few galley-slaves dragging their fetters: two of them were eating off the breech of a gun; at that iron table they could at least dream of liberty.
When formerly those galley-slaves rowed on board the _Bucentaur_, they wore a purple tunic thrown over their branded shoulders, to make them look like kings cleaving the waves with gilded paddles; they gladdened their toil with the clank of their chains, even as in Bengal, at the Feast of the Durga, the nautch-girls, dressed in gold gauze, accompany their dances with the sound of the rings with which their necks, arms and legs are adorned. The Venetian convicts married the doge to the sea and themselves renewed their indissoluble union with slavery.
Of those many fleets which bore the crusaders to the shores of Palestine and forbade any foreign sail to be displayed to the winds of the Adriatic, there remain a model of the _Bucentaur_, Napoleon's cutter, a savages' canoe and some designs of ships drawn in chalk on the black-board of the school of the Naval Guard.