The art of printing sank at once to less than a third of its productivity.

The city where it had flourished so long, and where it had effected so much of enduring value for European culture, was gagged in scarcely a less degree than Rome.

We have full right to insist upon these facts, and to draw from them a stringent corollary.

If Venice allowed the trade in books, which had brought her so much profit and such honor in the past, to be paralyzed by Clement's Index, what must have happened in other Italian towns?
The blow which maimed Venetian literature, was mortal elsewhere; and the finest works of genius in the first half of the seventeenth century had to find their publishers in Paris.[110] But these reflections have led me to anticipate the proper development of the subject of this chapter.
[Footnote 108: The document in question, prepared for the use of the Signoria, exists in MS.

in the Marcian Library, Misc.Eccl.et Civ.
Class.VII.Cod.