Last of all, it was decreed that those who had never themselves sat in the Council, nor had any ancestors who had been members, should be considered as ‘eligible by grace.’ This was done in order to leave a shadow of hope to ambitious men of other classes, an idea that they might some day be admitted as ‘new men’ into an assembly which was shutting its gates for ever. As a matter of fact, in the beginning a limited number of councillors ‘by grace’ were created, and some were chosen for their own personal merits, or to quiet the ambition of certain turbulent citizens. In order to be admitted in this manner, it was necessary in the first place to receive twenty-five votes from the Forty, and the votes of five out of six of the Doge’s counsellors. A few years later, admission was made still more difficult by requiring thirty votes from the Forty, and it is likely that under this law very few ‘new men’ were ever elected. Venice was still far from the days when the first comer would be able to buy a seat in the Great Council at auction, in order that the proceeds might help to pay the interest on the public debt. The exclusion of illegitimate sons, which was already in force, was maintained, and it was further ordained that no one under twenty-five years of age should enter the Council. The latter measure, however, was soon followed by a palliative one. Each year, on the fourth of December, the feast of Saint Barbara, the Doge placed in an urn the names of all young nobles twenty years of age, who at twenty-five would have the right to a place in the Council, and thirty of these were drawn by lot, and received permission to be present at the assemblies of the Council from that day, but without the right of voting; this constituted a sort of novitiate in those duties to which, at the regular established age, the young men would be called. The process of admission was called ‘coming to the Barbarella.’ It appears to me that the last word contains a play on words; for it may mean ‘the little Barbara,’ the saint on whose feast the lots were drawn, or it may mean the down on the chin of a youth of twenty, ‘the little beard,’ for though an improperly formed diminutive, it is quite a possible one in dialect. As may be imagined, the nobles showed the utmost haste and anxiety to prove their rights before the ‘avogadori,’ or counsel to the commonwealth, whose duty it was to decide upon them. In some cases there was evidence that an ancestor had sat in the Council at the end of the twelfth century, but it might be that there were no documents to prove it, and the most [Sidenote: _Galliccioli, i. 331._]