han home in the morning,
and gayer than Paris in the evening. Such has long been the character of
the Queen of the Adriatic. She has been truly, as briefly described by
the poet,--

"The revel of the earth, the mask of Italy!"

Once a better destiny appeared to be about to dawn on Venice. In the
sixteenth century the Reformation knocked at her gates, and for a moment
it seemed as if these gates were to be opened, and the stranger
admitted. Had it been so, the chair of her Doge would not now have been
empty, nor would Austrian manacles have been pressing upon her limbs.
"The evangelical doctrine had made such progress," writes Dr M'Crie, "in
the city of Venice, between the years 1530 and 1542, that its friends,
who had hitherto met in private for mutual instruction and religious
exercises, held deliberations on the propriety of organizing themselves
into regular congregations, and assembling in public." Several members
of the Senate were favourable to it, and hopes were entertained at one
time that the authority of that body would be interposed in its behalf.
This hope was strengthened by the fact, that when Ochino ascended the
pulpit, "the whole city ran in crowds to hear their favourite preacher."
But, alas! the hope was delusive. It was the Inquisition, not the
Reformation, to which Venice opened her gates; and when I surveyed her
calm and beautiful Lagunes, my emotions partook at once of grief and
exultation,--grief at the remembrance of the many midnight tragedies
enacted on them, and exultation at the thought, that in the seas of
Venice there sleeps much holy dust awaiting the resurrection of the
just. "Drowning was the mode of death to which they doomed the
Protestants," says Dr M'Crie, "either because it was less cruel and
odious than committing them to the flames, or because it accorded with
the customs of Venice. But if the _autos da fe_ of the Queen of the
Adriatic were less barbarous than those of Spain, the solitude and
silence with which they were accompanied were calculated to excite the
deepest horror. At the dead hour of midnight the prisoner was taken from
his cell, and put into a gondola or Venetian boat, attended only,
besides the sailors, by a single priest, to act as confessor. He was
rowed out into the sea, beyond the Two Castles, where another boat was
in waiting. A plank was then laid across the two gondolas, upon which
the prisoner, having his body chained, and a heavy stone affixed to his
fe