of Elizabeth, and as wary, it is not impossible that the fate of the reformation in England and Italy might have been the same. Popish historians are right enough when they attribute the salvation of the Roman catholic religion south of the Alps, in a main degree, to the establishment of the Inquisition at Rome, in 1543. There was, at least, wisdom in this wickedness. It drove out of the country, or buried in its dungeons, or pursued to the death, all who ventured to think for themselves; and so the unity of the church was restored-Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. For twenty years and more was this accursed engine in the utmost activity, and so well it did its work, that all traces of the reformation at length disappeared; down it went, with a shriek, like a drowning man, and the waters close over him, and not a sign is left that he has ever been. Now were spies commissioned to disperse themselves over the country, and being furnished with recommendations, and disguised under a variety of characters, they gained access to the secrets of their simple hosts, and betrayed them to the Inquisition. To this day may be seen in the cellars of this cruel tribunal at Venice, (for here, too, the policy of the pope had contrived its establishment,) written with an unsteady hand, as in the dark, apophthegms, which may well have had their origin in those days of perfidy:

'Da chi mi fido, guardami Dio;

Da chi non mi fido, mi guardarò io.'

For mutual suspicion was now sown amongst the members of the same hearth-husband and wife, parent and child, master and servant, hastened to get the start of each other in the race of unnatural treachery; and a man's foes literally became those of his own household. But the number of persons thus secretly denounced, and in many cases silently disposed of, must remain a mystery till that day when, amongst other deeds of darkness, these, too, shall be disclosed.

Know that I am in great trouble, and danger of my life,' writes Altieri, the Venetian reformer, to Bullinger; nor is there a place in Italy where I can be safe with my wife and boy. My fears for myself increase daily, for I know the wicked will never rest till they have swallowed me up alive. Give me a place in your prayers.'-p. 224.

And no more is heard of Altieri! The misguided people were stimulated by the inquisitors to supply them with victims, by appeals to their interest, present as well as future. There was no mischief, moral or physical, that befel them, of which the heretics were not at the bottom. The charges were made with as much decency as those against the camel at Jumbo, which was delivered over to the secular arm, as Bruce tells us, for having cursed the sheriff of Mecca, and for having threatened

to

to set fire to the town and destroy the wheat.

So were these poor creatures held up to the execration of a superstitious peasantry, as the evil eye which blighted their corn, and blasted their olive-yards, and sent a murrain among their cattle, and destroyed their substance. Other means, even more unjustifiable than these, were occasionally resorted to.

A rich nobleman of Modena, in the duchy of Ferrara,' writes Eglin to Bullinger, was lately informed against as a heretic to the pope, who had recourse to the following method of getting him into his claws:-The nobleman had a cousin at Rome, who was sent for to the castle of St. Angelo, and told, either you must die, or write to your cousin at Modena, desiring him to meet you at Bologna, as you wish to speak to him on important business. The letter was dispatched, and the nobleman, having ridden in haste to Bologna, was seized as soon as he had dismounted from his horse. His friend was then set at liberty. This is Dragon's game.'-p. 274.

We have sometimes thought that the courage of Milton, in avowing his religious sentiments during his travels in Italy, has been more talked of than the risk justified. But, no doubt, at that time there was danger in it, for the suspicions which the attempt at a reformation had excited were not as yet laid to sleep. Sir Henry Wotton's advice, il viso sciolto, i pensieri stretti; Galileo's imprisonment, and the imprudence Milton was thought to be guilty of in paying him a visit; the shyness of the Marquess of Manso towards the poet; the fact, also, which Evelyn mentions, of his having met with a Scotsman and an Irishman in Italy, who resided there, and found it needful to conceal that they were protestants-all these circumstances concur to prove that the alarm of the foregoing century had been great, and its effects lasting.

It was not the practice of the Inquisition of Italy to outrage the feelings of the people by a public display of its terrors. The tribunal was not popular in that country; to say the truth, the Italians are not a sanguinary nation, nor have ever been so in Christian times. It is a matter of just surprise, that with such governments as theirs, blood should be so seldom shed; and that society, constructed as it is, should hold together at all, with so little recourse to capital punishment. In Spain, it was otherwise; there the hatred of a Protestant succeeded to that of a Moor, and the burning of either was a holiday spectacle.

'Drowning was the mode of death to which they doomed the protestants at Venice, either because it was less cruel and odious than committing them to the flames, or because it accorded with the customs of the place. But if the autos da fè 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, beside 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 feet, was placed; and, on a signal given, the gondolas retiring from one another, he was precipitated into the deep.'-p. 233.

The persecution throughout Italy was, of course, co-extensive with the heresy; but here we feel almost compelled to pause, for in these days it is not gentlemanlike to talk about martyrs. prices of their ashes,' says Fuller, in his own inimitable language, rise and fall in Smithfield market. However,' (he justly adds,) 'their real worth flotes not with people's phancies, no more than a rock in the sea rises and falls with the tide; St. Paul is still St. Paul, though the Lycaonians now would sacrifice to him, and presently afterward sacrifice him.' We shall, therefore, venture to draw the attention of our readers to a few individuals of that numerous and noble army,' which laid down their lives for the religious liberties of Italy and for the truth.

Faventino Fannio, (we abridge the narrative of Dr. M'Crie,) a native of Faenza, within the States of the Church, having received the knowledge of the truth, by reading the Bible and other religious books, in his native language, imparted it to his neighbours, and was soon thrown into prison. Over-persuaded by his friends, he recanted, and regained his liberty, at the price of his peace of mind. He now determined to atone for his weakness, by spreading amongst his countrymen the reformed faith, with more zeal than before. He travelled through the province of Romagna, and wherever he had made a few converts, he left it to them to make others, and again went on his way rejoicing. At last, he was seized, and sent in chains to Ferrara :

To the lamentations of his wife and sister, who came to see him in prison, he replied, "Let it suffice you, that for your sakes I once denied my Saviour. Had I then had the knowledge which, by the grace of God, I have acquired since my fall, I would not have yielded to your entreaties. Go home in peace." His imprisonment, which lasted two years, was to the furtherance of the Gospel, so that his bonds in Christ were manifest in all the place.'

He was visited by the princess Lavinia della Rovere, by Olympia Morata, and other persons of distinction. At length admittance was refused to strangers: he then applied himself successfully to the instruction and conversion of his fellow-prisoners,

some

some of whom were people of rank, confined for offences against the state. He was now condemned to solitary confinement, and his prison and keeper were frequently changed by the priests, who were afraid of the interest he excited in those about him. -But the day of his release drew on—

In the year 1550, Julius III., rejecting every intercession made for his life, ordered him to be executed. He was accordingly brought to the stake at an early hour in the morning, to prevent the people from witnessing the scene; and, being first strangled, was committed to the Aames. p. 276.

Aonio Paleario was one of the best scholars of his day: he was successively a professor at Lucca and Milan. From the latter place, he was meditating a removal to Bologna, when, in the year 1566, he was caught, like many others, in that storm of persecution which followed the elevation of Pius V. to the popedom.

'Being seized by Frate Angelo da Cremona, the inquisitor, and conveyed to Rome, he was committed to close confinement in the Torre Nona. His book on the Benefit of Christ's death, (of which it may be remarked, that 40,000 copies were sold in six years,) his Commendations of Ochino, his Defence of himself before the senators of Sienna, and the suspicions which he had incurred during his residence at that place and at Lucca, were all revived against him. After the whole had been collected and sifted, the charge at last resolved itself into the four following articles:-That he denied purgatory; disapproved of burying the dead in churches, preferring the ancient Roman method of sepulture without the walls of cities; ridiculed the monastic life; and appeared to ascribe justification solely to confidence in the mercy of God forgiving our sins through Jesus Christ. For holding these opinions he was condemned, after an imprisonment of three years, to be suspended on a gibbet, and his body to be given to the flames; and the sentence was executed on the third of July, 1570, in the seventieth year of his age'-it being fit that so obstinate a son of Belial (such is the humane reflection of a Roman catholic church historian) should be delivered to the fire, that, after suffering its momentary pains here, he might be bound in everlasting flames hereafter.' (p. 300.) What if we should say of him, on the other hand, as a church historian of our own says of Ridley, that, like Elijah, he was but going up to heaven in a chariot of fire?'

Bartolomeo Bartoccio was the son of a wealthy citizen of Castel, in the duchy of Spoletto. A companion in arms at the siege of Sienna first communicated to him the tenets of the reformers. He soon became an object of distrust to his bishop, and escaped to Venice; but when he had ascertained that all hope of return to his native place was gone, he retired to Geneva, married,

married, and became a manufacturer of silk.

In the year 1567, the concerns of his trade took him to Genoa. He had as sumed a name, but having confided his own to a merchant, he was betrayed by him, and delivered to the inquisition.

'The magistrates of Geneva and Berne sent to demand his liberation from the Genoese republic, but before their envoy arrived, the prisoner had been sent to Rome, at the request of the pope. After suffering an imprisonment of nearly two years, he was sentenced to be burned alive. The courage which Bartocci had all along displayed did not forsake him in the trying hour. He walked to the place of execution with a firm step and unaltered countenance, and the cry "Vittoria, Vittoria!" was distinctly heard from him after he was wrapped in the flames.'-p. 305.

But the blackest page in the annals of these hard-hearted times will be found in the history of that colony of Waldenses which we have already said had emigrated to Calabria. Here had they been dwelling for some generations, prosperous, and in peace. By the sixteenth century, they had increased to four thousand, and were possessed of two towns on the coast, Santo Xisto and La Guardia. Constant intercourse with their catholic neighbours, and a long separation from their kindred in the Alps, had corrupted their primitive simplicity, and though they still retained a form of worship of their own, they did not scruple to frequent mass. The report of a new doctrine abroad, resembling that of their forefathers, had reached their ears; they sought to become acquainted with it, and, convinced that they had been wrong in their conformity with the Roman catholic ritual, they applied to their brethren in the valleys of Pragela, and to the ministers of Geneva, for teachers, who should give them a better knowledge of these things. The circumstance was not long a secret at Rome, and two monks, Valerio Malvicino and Alfonso Urbino ('tis a pity to defraud them of their fame,) were sent to reduce them to obedience. They did their work like genuine sons of St. Dominic. In ancient times, heathen inquisitors required suspected Christians to cast a handful of incense upon an altar, and in default of this, they condemned them to the flames. These inquisitors of the holy office substituted attendance at mass as their test of orthodoxy. The people of Santo Xisto refused to comply, and fled to the woods. Those of La Guardia, deluded into a belief that their brethren had already submitted, reluctantly acquiesced, only to reproach themselves with what they had done, when the truth was known. Two companies of foot soldiers were now sent in quest of the fugitives, but these latter were not to be intimidated by cries of Amazzi, Amazzi!' and, taking their post on a hill, they came to a parley with the captain.