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 feet, was placed; and, on a signal given, the gondolas retiring from one another, he was precipitated into the deep." "We can do nothing against the truth," says the apostle. Venice is rotting in her Lagunes: the Reformation, shaking off the chains with which men attempted to bind it, is starting on a new career of progress.