the English Embassy and demanded an audience of the Doge; it was with the greatest difficulty that she could be made to understand the impossibility of being admitted until the next morning, and she reluctantly retired for the night to her hired house, that Mocenigo palace which was afterwards successively inhabited by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and by Lord Byron. On the morrow the ambassador went with her to the ducal palace, and she must have passed below the window from which the body of her friend had hung all the previous day. She was admitted to the presence of the Signory, and the Doge made her sit on his right hand. She now learned that she was believed to have allowed Foscarini to use her house as a place from which to carry on intrigues with foreign courts. Sir Henry Wotton spoke in the Countess’s defence, and proved that her relations with Foscarini had always been of the most honourable character, and that the two had not met for many months. England’s star was in the ascendant, Elizabeth had reigned, and it was not good to contradict an English ambassador nor to speak lightly of an English lady. The Doge made the Countess his most humble excuses and promised to send them to her husband, the Earl Marshal, through the Venetian ambassador in London. The Senate took cognisance of the affair also, and voted a small sum of money to be expended in a present of comfits and wax to the Countess, this being the custom for all persons of quality who appeared before the Signory. But that was all. Lady Arundel had exculpated herself, but so far Foscarini’s guilt seemed to be so incontrovertibly proved, that Fra Paolo Sarpi refused to accept a legacy which the unhappy patrician had left him in his last will. But as time went on the whole of Vano’s fabricated evidence began to go to pieces. The Inquisitors of State themselves seem to have been the first to suspect that they had made a mistake, and before long the dreadful truth was only too clear. Foscarini [Sidenote: _Rom. vii. 196; Armand Baschet, Arch. 631._] had been perfectly innocent and had been murdered by justice. It was not a case that could be hushed and put out of the way, either, for too many people knew what had happened. The Council of Ten made amends: let us give them such credit as we can for their public repentance, without inquiring too closely what pressure was brought to bear upon them by the public, and not improbably by England. Monsieur Baschet becomes lyric in his praise of their magnanimity. For my part, I do not think it would have been safe for the Council to try and hide its mistake. The Ten apologised amply before the world: that is the important matter. Monsieur Baschet gives the original text of the apology, of which I translate a part from the Italian:--