inations."

As a previous step, in order to arouse popular feeling against the Great
Council, it was determined to practise a singular stratagem. Parties of
the conspirators paraded different quarters of the capital in the dead
of night, and having stopped at the windows of some citizens of the
middle and lower classes, and there insulted the women of the family
by scandalous and unseemly propositions, they retired with rude bursts
of laughter, calling each other loudly by the names of the principal
noblemen. Perhaps the rapidity with which their design was framed,
tended much to its concealment. Scarcely a little month had elapsed
since its first projection, and now the following day was to destroy the
constitution of Venice, to deluge her streets with patrician blood, and
to pluck up all her ancient stocks from their very roots, without a
suspicion of the approaching calamity having glanced across the intended
victims.--Either the Council of X could not yet have obtained its
subsequent fearful and extraordinary ubiquity, or the conspirators must
have exhibited a prudence and self-control rarely, if ever, paralleled
by an equally large body of men, engaged in a similar attempt. To their
minor agents, their ultimate design had not been revealed; and even in
the end, the discovery arose not from treachery, nor from incaution, but
from "a compunctious visiting" of one framed of stuff less stern than
his associates, and who shrank from the murder of a benefactor. The part
played by Tresham in that yet more bloody conspiracy, which the Papists,
in after days, framed against the three estates of England, was but
a repetition of that now enacted in Venice by Beltramo of Bergamo.
Beltramo had been brought up in a noble family, to which he was closely
attached, that of Nicolo Lioni, of San Stefano; and, anxious to preserve
his patron's life, he went to him on the evening before the rising, and
entreated him to remain at home on the morrow. The singular nature of
the request excited surprise, which was increased to suspicion by the
ambiguous answers returned to farther inquiries which it suggested. By
degrees, every particular of the treason was revealed; and Lioni heard
of the impending danger with terror, and of the hands by which it was
threatened, with astonishment and slowly-accorded belief. Not a moment
was to be lost; he secured Beltramo, therefore, and, having communicated
with a few friends, they resolved upon assembling