Lord Byron, in 1819, knew nothing of this discovery, and making inquiries about the tomb of the beheaded Doge in San Giovanni e Paolo, a priest showed him a small tomb built into the wall, and tried to persuade
[Illustration: THE TOMBS IN SS. GIOVANNI E PAOLO]
him that this was Marino Faliero’s last resting-place; a matter concerning which the poet expressed considerable doubt.
The great stone sarcophagus spoken of by Giovanni Casoni was used afterwards during many years as a reservoir by the apothecary of the Civil Hospital, and is to-day in the outer loggia of the Correr Museum, bearing no trace of inscription or arms. The latter were probably shipped off.
With regard to the absence from the archives of the Council of Ten of all documents relating to the trial of Marino Faliero, many historians, among whom are Romanin and Rawdon Brown, are inclined to suppose that it was not entered in the acts of the Council, owing to what they call a certain praiseworthy shame on the part of the judges, which hindered them from inserting the name of the head of the Republic among those of other condemned persons. There are sufficient reasons and sufficient proofs, however, for supposing that the whole account of the trial was set down in a special book, which had no place in the regular series of the archives of the Council; and that this volume was either lost, or was burned in one of the fires which have at different times done damage in the ducal palace. The official report was evidently known to the old chroniclers, who translated long passages from it, from the original Latin into the vulgar tongue. This volume is referred to in a marginal note found in a document of 1355, referring to the conspiracy--‘Ponatur in libro processum.’
The Council of Ten was never subject to such praiseworthy crises of shame; and the secretary of the Council, as Lazzarini observes, would have been very much astonished if he could have had cognisance of the conjectures which our modern sentimentalism would form regarding the facts. A number of other documents are missing from the archives of the Council of Ten, of which the absence does not suggest either a poetical interpretation, or any explanation of a political character; the papers were simply lost.