For some time longer,
however, he paced one of the principal rooms of the outer suite, until
the usual hour having arrived, he sought his rest, and the palace was
closed for the night.
The reader will have gained some insight into the character of the
individual who was the chief actor in the foregoing scenes. The Signor
Gradenigo was born with all the sympathies and natural kindliness of
other men, but accident, and an education which had received a strong
bias from the institutions of the self-styled Republic, had made him the
creature of a conventional policy. To him Venice seemed a free state,
because he partook so largely of the benefits of her social system; and,
though shrewd and practised in most of the affairs of the world, his
faculties, on the subject of the political ethics of his country, were
possessed of a rare and accommodating dulness. A senator, he stood in
relation to the state as a director of a moneyed institution is
proverbially placed in respect to his corporation; an agent of its
collective measures, removed from the responsibilities of the man. He
could reason warmly, if not acutely, concerning the principles of
government, and it would be difficult, even in this money-getting age,
to find a more zealous convert to the opinion that property was not a
subordinate, but the absorbing interest of civilized life. He would talk
ably of character, and honor, and virtue, and religion, and the rights
of persons, but when called upon to act in their behalf, there was in
his mind a tendency to blend them all with worldly policy, that proved
as unerring as the gravitation of matter to the earth's centre.
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