Note 415 — Scene II.—A retired spot near the Arsenal.

[The citizens of Aquileia and Padua fled before the invasion of Attila, and retired to the Isle of Gradus, and Rivus Altus, or Rialto. Theodoric's minister, Cassiodorus, who describes the condition of the fugitives some seventy years after they had settled on the "hundred isles," compares them to "waterfowl who had fixed their nests on the bosom of the waves." (See Gibbon's Decline and Fall, etc., 1825, ii. 375, note 6, and 376, notes 1, 2.)]