In 1526, for instance, the Patriarch of Venice laid before the Great Council a complaint against the Signors of the Night, who refused to set at liberty a certain priest arrested by them, or even to inform the ecclesiastical authorities of the nature of his misdemeanour. That would have been one of the occasions for excluding the ‘papalisti.’ The Patriarch seems to have been a hot-tempered person, for on finding that he could get no satisfaction from the Great Council, he excommunicated the Venetian government and everybody connected with it, and posted the notice of the interdict on the columns of the ducal palace. The matter was patched up in some way, however, for on the morrow the notice disappeared. The Senate met twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. I find among their regulations a singular rule by which the beginning of every speech had to be delivered in the Tuscan language, after which the speaker was at liberty to go on in his own Venetian dialect. [Sidenote: _Fulin, Studii, Arch. Ven. I. 1871 (unfinished)._] I have already spoken at some length of the Council of Ten; it is now necessary to say something of the Inquisitors of State, to whom the Ten ceded a part of their authority in the sixteenth century. In the first place, the Inquisitors of State never had anything to do with the ‘Inquisition,’ nor with the ‘Inquisitors of the Holy Office,’ a tribunal, oddly enough, which was much more secular than ecclesiastic, and which belongs to a later period. Secondly, the so-called ‘Statutes of the Inquisitors of State,’ published by the French historian Daru, in good faith, and translated by Smedley, were [Sidenote: _Rom. vi._] afterwards discovered to be nothing but an impudent forgery, containing several laughable anachronisms, and a number of mistakes about the nature of the magistracies which prove that the forger was not even a Venetian. Thirdly, the genuine Statutes have been discovered since, and are given at length by Romanin. They do not bear the least resemblance to the nonsense published by Daru. No one except Romanin would have attempted to whitewash the Inquisitors and the Council of Ten, and even he is obliged to admit that for ‘weighty reasons of state’ they did not hesitate to order secret assassinations; but they were not fools, as the ‘Statutes’ of Daru make them appear. The proof that the Statutes published by Romanin are genuine consists in the fact that two independent copies of them have been found; the one, written out by Angelo Nicolosi, secretary to the Inquisitors, with a dedication to them dated the twenty-fifth of September 1669; the other, a pocket copy, written out in 1612, with his own hand, by the Inquisitor Niccolò Donà, nephew of the Doge Leonardo Donà. The Statutes in these two copies are identical; the earlier one, which belonged to Donà, contains also a number of interesting memoranda concerning the doings of the tribunal in that year.