Padua was temporarily obliged to submit to Louis XII. of France at the beginning of the sixteenth century, but the Republic took it again in 1509, and from that date until 1797 there was never the least interruption in the academic courses. The only influence exercised upon the university by the Venetian government was intended to give it a more patriotically Venetian character. In earlier times the Bishop of Padua had been _ex officio_ the Rector of the university; he was now deprived of this dignity, which was conferred jointly on three Venetian nobles, who were elected for two years, and were required to reside in Venice and not in Padua, lest they should be exposed to influences foreign to the spirit of the Republic. Their title was ‘Riformatori dell’ Università,’ and great care was exercised in choosing them. They were also the official inspectors of the Venetian schools and of the national libraries, and it was their business to examine candidates for the position of teachers in any authorised institution. They were no doubt terrible pedants, inwardly much dignified by a sense of their great responsibilities, and to this day, in northern Italy, it is said of a man who wearies his family and his acquaintances with perpetual ‘nagging’--there is no dictionary word for it--that he is like a ‘Riformatore’ of the University of Padua, though the good people who use the phrase have no clear idea of what it means. These three patricians had an official dress of their own, which was a long robe, sometimes black and [Sidenote: _Yriarte, Vie; Rom. iv. 449._] sometimes of a violet colour, changing according to some regulation which is not known, but always made with sleeves of the ‘ducal’ pattern; and they put on a black stole over it. If one of them was a Knight of the Golden Stole, as often happened, his robe was of velvet and his stole was of cloth of gold. The Holy See was not much pleased by the way in which the Republic treated the Bishop of Padua, and constantly complained that the students of the University were allowed too much license to express opinions that ill accorded with Catholic dogma. Like all commercial countries, Venice was Protestant in so far as any direct interference of the Vatican was concerned. Mr. Brooks Adams was, I think, the first to point out the inseparable connection between Protestantism and commercial enterprise, in his extraordinary study, _The Law of Civilization and Decay_. The peculiarity of Venice’s religious position was that it combined an excessive, if not superstitious, devotion to the rites of the Church with something approaching to contempt of the Pope’s power. The University of Padua was resorted to by students of all nations, including many English gentlemen. In the Archives of the Ten a petition has been found signed by a number of foreign students in Padua to be allowed to wear arms, and we find that the [Sidenote: _Rom. iv. 449, note 5._]