It was not from dreamy, voluptuous Southern Italy that the religious progress of the Italian race received any vigorous impulses.  These came from more northern and more mountainous regions, from the severe, clear heights of Florence, Perugia, and Assisi, where the intellectual and the moral both had somewhat of the old Etruscan earnestness and gloom.

One may easily imagine the stupid alarm and helpless confusion of these easy-going monks, when their new Superior came down among them hissing with a white heat from the very hottest furnace-fires of a new religious experience, burning and quivering with the terrors of the world to come,—­pale, thin, eager, tremulous, and yet with all the martial vigor of the former warrior, and all the habits of command of a former princely station.  His reforms gave no quarter to right or left; sleepy monks were dragged out to midnight-prayers, and their devotions enlivened with vivid pictures of hell-fire and ingenuities of eternal torment enough to stir the blood of the most torpid.  There was to be no more gormandizing, no more wine-bibbing; the choice old wines were placed under lock and key for the use of the sick and poor in the vicinity; and every fast of the Church, and every obsolete rule of the order, were revived with unsparing rigor.  It is true, they hated their new Superior with all the energy which laziness and good living had left them, but they every soul of them shook in their sandals before him; for there is a true and established order of mastery among human beings, and when a man of enkindled energy and intense will comes among a flock of irresolute commonplace individuals, he subjects them to himself by a sort of moral paralysis similar to what a great, vigorous gymnotus distributes among a fry of inferior fishes.  The bolder ones, who made motions of rebellion, were so energetically swooped upon, and consigned to the discipline of dungeon and bread-and-water, that less courageous natures made a merit of siding with the more powerful party, mentally resolving to carry by fraud the points which they despaired of accomplishing by force.

On the morning we speak of, two monks might have been seen lounging on a stone bench by one of the arches, looking listlessly into the sombre garden-patch we have described.  The first of these, Father Anselmo, was a corpulent fellow, with an easy swing of gait, heavy animal features, and an eye of shrewd and stealthy cunning:  the whole air of the man expressed the cautious, careful voluptuary.  The other, Father Johannes, was thin, wiry, and elastic, with hands like birds’ claws, and an eye that reminded one of the crafty cunning of a serpent.  His smile was a curious blending of shrewdness and malignity.  He regarded his companion from time to time obliquely from the corners of his eyes, to see what impression his words were making, and had a habit of jerking himself up in the middle of a sentence and looking warily round to see if any one were listening, which indicated habitual distrust.