his portrait in the Ducal Library, showing the great gash made by
the Vatican assassins.

Time went on, and generations came which seemed to forget him.
Still worse, generation after generation came, carefully trained
by clerical teachers to misunderstand and hate him. But these
teachers went too far; for, in 1771, nearly one hundred and fifty
years after his death, the monk Vaerini gathered together, in a
pretended biography, all the scurrilities which could be
imagined, and endeavored to bury the memory of the great patriot
beneath them. This was too much. The old Venetian spirit, which
had so long lain dormant, now asserted itself: Vaerini was
imprisoned and his book suppressed.

A quarter of a century later the Republic fell under the rule of
Austria, and Austria's most time-honored agency in keeping down
subject populations has always been the priesthood. Again Father
Paul's memory was virtually proscribed, and in 1803 another
desperate attempt was made to cover him with infamy. In that year
appeared a book entitled The Secret History of the Life of Fra
Paolo Sarpi, and it contained not only his pretended biography,
but what claimed to be Sarpi's own letters and other documents
showing him to be an adept in scoundrelism and hypocrisy. Its
editor was the archpriest Ferrara of Mantua; but on the
title-page appeared, as the name of its author, Fontanini,
Archbishop of Ancira, a greatly respected prelate who had died
nearly seventy years before, and there was also stamped, not only
upon the preliminary, but upon the final page of the work, the
approval of the Austrian government. To this was added a pious
motto from St. Augustine, and the approval of Pius VII was