captain. They entreated him to have pity on their wives and children they said that they and their fathers had for ages dwelt in the country, and had given just cause of offence to no man; that they were ready to go by sea or land wherever their superiors might direct; that they would not take with them more than was needful for their support by the way, and would engage never to return; that they would cheerfully abandon their houses and substance, provided they could retain unmolested their principles and faith. To this address, as well as to the hope expressed at the same time, that they might not be driven to a desperate defence, the officer turned a deaf ear. His men were ordered to advance, and most of them fell by the swords of the Vaudois. The monks now wrote to Naples for assistance, which was sent, and all the cruelties which could be exercised by the combined ingenuity of pitiless banditti, (for such were literally the troops now employed,) and yet more pitiless inquisitors, were put in force against this devoted race. Of the last scene of their sufferings, a record is preserved in a letter to Ascanio Caraccioli, from his servant, an eye-witness of the facts he relates, and a Roman catholic. It is given by Dr. M'Crie, as follows: 'Most Illustrious Sir-Having written you from time to time what has been done here in the affair of heresy, I have now to inform you of the dreadful justice which began to be executed on these Lutherans early this morning, being the eleventh of June; and, to tell you the truth, I can compare it to nothing but the slaughter of so many sheep. They were all shut up in one house, as in a sheep-fold: the executioner went, and bringing out one of them, covered his face with a napkin or benda, as we call it, and causing him to kneel down, cut his throat with a knife. Then, taking off the bloody napkin, he went and brought out another, whom he put to death after the same manner. In this way, the whole number, amounting to eighty-eight, were butchered. I leave you to figure to yourself the lamentable spectacle, for I scarcely can refrain from tears while I write; nor was there any person, who, after witnessing the execution of one, could stand to look on a second. The meekness and patience with which they went to martyrdom and death was incredible. Some of them at their death professed themselves of the same faith with us, but the greater part died in their cursed obstinacy. All the old men met their death with cheerfulness, but the young exhibited symptoms of fear. 'According to orders, waggons were already come to carry away the dead bodies, which are appointed to be quartered and hung up on the public roads, from one end of Calabria to the other. Unless his holiness and the viceroy of Naples command the marquess de Bruccianici, the governor of this province, to stay his hand, and leave off, he will go on to put others to the torture, and multiply the executions until he has destroyed the whole. Even to-day, a decree has passed, that that a hundred grown-up women shall be put to the question, and afterwards executed. The heretics taken in Calabria amount to sixteen hundred, all of whom are condemned; but only eighty-eight have as yet been put to death. This people came originally from the valley of Angrogna, near Savoy, and in Calabria are called "Ultra-Montani." Four other places in the kingdom of Naples are inhabited by the same race, but I do not know that they behave ill, for they are a simple unlettered people, entirely occupied with the spade and plough, and, I am told, show themselves sufficiently religious at the hour of death.'-p. 263. 'Lest the reader,' continues Dr. M'Crie, should be inclined to doubt the truth of such horrid atrocities, the following summary account of them, by a Neapolitan historian of that age, may be added.' After giving some account of the Calabrian heretics, he says Some had their throats cut, others were sawn through the middle, aud others thrown from the top of a high cliff; all were cruelly but deservedly put to death. It was strange to hear of their obstinacy; for while the father saw the son put to death, and the son his father, they not only gave no symptoms of grief, but said, joyfully, that they would be angels of God: so much had the devil, to whom they had given themselves up as a prey, deceived them.' Dr. M'Crie thus winds up this miserable narrative : By the time that the persecutors were glutted with blood, it was not difficult to dispose of the prisoners who remained. The men were sent to the Spanish gallies; the women and children were sold for slaves ; and, with the exception of a few who renounced their faith, the whole colony was exterminated. "Many a time have they afflicted me from my youth," may the race of the Waldenses say, "Many a time have they afflicted me from my youth; my blood, the violence done to me and to my flesh be upon" Rome!'-p. 266. Who can read these piteous details without saying Amen to the closing prayer of that collect in verse (as it has been well called), of our great poet, writ on a similar massacre of the original stock ? O Lord, their martyred blood and ashes sow The protestants who survived were, for the most part, scattered abroad. Those who lived near the borders sought an asylum in Switzerland and France, and some travelled even as far as Flanders and England. They introduced into the countries which received them many of the arts peculiar to their own: silk manufactories, mills, and dying-houses, were built under their instruc tions, and, like the fugitives from the intolerance of the Duke of Alva shortly after, and again from that of Louis XIV., they repaid the hospitality shown them by opening, wherever they came, sources of wealth hitherto unknown. Sometimes, they migrated in a body, as did those of Locarno, but with the mark of Cain set upon them by the church, and left to struggle through the snows and ice of the Rhætian Alps as best they could, it being one of their misfortunes that their flight was in the winter.' These achieved their liberties like men, but all had not their hardihood. A band of Neapolitans resolved upon the same course, but when they came to those noble mountains where they were to take a last view of the land of their fathers, the greater part, struck with its beauties, and calling to mind the friends and comforts which they had left behind, abandoned their enterprise, parted with their companions, returned to Naples,' and lived to find that the loss of self-esteem is a far greater evil than the loss of country, and that infirmity of purpose in a good cause is the last sin which society forgives. Many, again, dwelling in the interior of Italy, where escape in a body was hopeless, stole away singly, and if tempted to return, as they sometimes were, for their families, or the wreck of their fortunes, fell a prey to the vigilance of the Inquisition. Nor were there wanting those, who, dismayed alike at the prospect of banishment or death, looked back from the plough to which they had put an unsteady hand, and made their peace with Rome by timely compliance. Thus ended the Reformation in Italy. It only remains to say a few words on the causes which produced its extinction; to the chief one of which, indeed, we have already had occasion to allude. 1. In the first place, the system of the Roman catholic religion was more difficult of eradication in Italy than in any other quarter of the world. It had taken advantage of all the most ancient sympathies of the country and the long-established practices of Pagan times. The people had been made to slide out of a Gentile into what stood for a Christian ritual: as little violence as might be was done to their previous prejudices, and as many of these as possible, and more than were innocent, had been spared and cherished. The temples were turned into churches; the altars of the old gods served for the new saints; the curtains with which they were shrouded, the finery with which they were bedecked, the incense burnt before them, and the votive tablets suspended to their honour, all continued as they had been. The garlands over the doors had withered-and were replaced; the aquaminarium which held the water of purification, held it still; the bell was still rung to excite the worshipper, or expel the demon; and the sacrifice which had been offered, was offered as before, before, and its well-known name of hostia, or host, retained. In earthquake, pestilence, or drought, the succour of either of these classes of superior beings was successively resorted to, and in precisely the same way. They were entreated, they were coaxed, they were scolded, they were threatened, in terms not distinguishable; processions were made for them, and tapers, music, tapestry, fraternities, and a box of relics, propitiated them alike. Hills and fountains were the asylums of either, and the votaries of the saint were exhorted to say their orisons at the one, or crawl upon their knees to the other, as it had been the practice to do by the gods in the days of their ancestors; a figure of St. Peter relieved guard at the gate for Mercury or Cardea; the niche in the parlour, or bed-room, was occupied by St. Roque, or St. Sebastian, instead of the Phrygian penates; your person was protected by a St. Vitale next your skin, in the room of an Æsculapius, or an Apollo; pollution was averted from your walls by a frowning St. Benedict, instead of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, and the Twelve Gods; and you set sail in a ship whose sign was St. Nicholas, and with about the same chance of skill, presence of mind, and self-confidence in the crew, as if her sign had still continued to be Castor and Pollux. But this system of accommodation, whereby sentiments of loyalty to the old religion were to be enlisted for the new, is yet more apparent in another particular. The religion of our Lord and his Apostles afforded no plausible pretence for the worship of those nymphs and goddesses to which the Italians had been used. What was to become of the devotion that had thus been paid to the softer sex? Where was this to be directed? The Virgin was thought of as fitted to stand in the gap, and to the Virgin were the honours transferred: she became practically the Cybele of a former generation; she had her title, Deipara; cakes were offered to her as the queen of heaven; beggars asked an alms 'per la Madonna,' as they had heretofore done, by legal permission, pro Matre Deûm ;' and the festival of the Idæan Mother was no other than Lady-day. Inferior female saints now took the places, in their turn, of the inferior goddesses in some cases, the very name of the deity descended to her successor, and Anna Perenna, the nymph of the Numicius, is to be found (we believe) to this day, in the same neighbourhood, under the alias of St. Anna Petronilla. The ancient system of coquetry and stolen interviews between deities of the one sex and mortals of the other, revived, not unfrequently with more than all the grossness, but seldom with much of the poetry of other times. Thus were Romans surprised into Roman-catholics, and the vulgar at least, without being conscious of having undergone any very sensible mutation, were assured, that all was right, and that by by some means or other changed they were intus et in cute. This confusion of religious character strikes us in almost every page of the more ancient Italian writers: it is quite a feature in the early literature of Italy; sacred and profane images are blended without the smallest regard to decency, though evidently without any consciousness of a want of it in the parties themselves. It was the custom of the day to plough with an ox and an ass; a mistake has been often made about it by those who have written on the revival of learning, and the motley union has been imputed to the pedantry of an age awaking from barbarism, and vain (as sciolists always are) of its new acquirements. This was not altogether the case; it was the humour of the times which had made men neither Christians nor pagans, which could again confound Jupiter with Barnabas, and Mercury with Paul. From all this, however, it is plain enough, that, independently of that hold which the church of Rome takes of any people by engaging their senses, and combining some religious rite with all the ordinary duties and occupations of common life, it bound the people of Italy by a spell of their own, even the natural affection which men have for the rites and customs of their forefathers. 2. Again-In some countries, and more especially in England, since the reign of Edward III., there had been a constant political struggle going on between the secular and ecclesiastical authorities. The king and nobles had perpetually to dispute the tyrannical pretensions of the Roman catholic church; for though Tityrus might go to Rome in search of liberty (Virg. Ec. i. 27), the men of England thought it the last place where she was likely to be found. A quiet but organised opposition to the Pope was thus formed, which the Reformation found in the country and fed upon. In Italy, no spirit of this kind could exist, because the secular and ecclesiastical authorities were there united in one and the same head. In Italy, therefore, there was not that political pabulum for a reformation which existed elsewhere. The seed fell upon stony ground, and sprang up, indeed, but withered for lack of moisture. 3. Further-Amongst the Italian reformers themselves there were many unhappy divisions, which wasted their strength. Some of the questions that thus ministered strife were upon fundamentals the doctrines of the Trinity and atonement. Here accommodation was impossible, because there was a disagreement as to the object of worship. Others were more speculative, and might, perhaps, have admitted of adjustment. Luther and Zuingle, in their conflicting sentiments on the eucharist, had each their zealous followers in Italy, and the former, interposing with his characteristic impetuosity, only widened the breach. Dr. M'Crie |