The persecution raged with redoubled fury under Pius the Fifth: especially at Bologna, where "persons of all ranks were indiscriminately subjected to the same imprisonment, tortures, and death. In Rome, some were every day burnt, hanged, or beheaded; all the prisons were filled, and they were obliged to seek new ones." Think of the constancy of these confessors! Rome had no need to go to Japan for martyrs. If she should hereafter have a Protestant martyrology, many of her own sons and daughters may be enrolled in it. "We know not what becomes of people here," wrote Muretus to De Thou; "I am terrified every morning when I rise, lest I should be told that such and such a one is no more: and if it should be so, we should not dare to say a word." And thus the Italian Reformation was crushed out! But its motto is "Resurgam!" II. "The 'Alfabeto Christiano' is a book unknown even to bibliographers for the last three centuries. It had its origin in an actual conversation between Juan de Valdés, twin brother to the Latin secretary of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, and Giulia Gonzaga, Duchess of Trajetto and Countess of Fondi, at Naples, about the close of 1535, or the beginning of the following year. At her request it was immediately afterwards written down by him in Spanish, to promote her instruction and refresh her memory. It now essentially conveys to us the spirit and substance of the conversation in the precise form and manner in which it took place between them."--_Introduction by Benjamin B. Wiffen, Esq., to his translation of the "Alfabeto Christiano."_ "It was printed at a time when for a few years the press of Venice was comparatively free; and when, taking advantage of this liberty, then existing nowhere else in Italy, it multiplied the tracts of the Reformation by thousands. When the friends of Valdés were afterwards persecuted at Naples, and his name condemned by the authority of Rome, implicating by connection with him, one of the most distinguished members of the noble family of the Gonzagas,--all parties, friends equally with opponents, would of course be concerned to observe silence on the subject; while all the friends of the family would be urged alike by religious sentiment and by family considerations to destroy silently and irrecoverably every copy of a book that appeared to cast, by its association with her name, the shadow of its principles upon those who were allied to her."--_Ibid._ The passage describing the manner in which a stray copy fell into his hands, and the circumstances under which he perused it, is one of the pleasantest in Mr. Wiffen's Introduction. McCrie quotes a passage from Fontaine, who tells us that "on taking down an old house at Urbino, in 1728, the workmen disinterred a copy of Bruccioli's 'Paraphrase of St. Paul's Epistles,' with some books of Ochino, Valdés, and others of the same kind, which had remained in concealment for more than a century and a half." III.