conjurer summoned courage to inquire when Cellini might hope to be restored to his lost love, Angelica;—­for this was the trivial object of the incantation.  The demons answered (how we are not told) that he would meet her ere a month had passed away.  This prophecy, as it happened, was fulfilled.  Then they redoubled their attacks; the necromancer kept crying out that the peril was most imminent, until the matin bells of Rome swung through the darkness, freeing them at last from fear.  As they walked home, the boy, holding the Sicilian by his robe and Benvenuto by his mantle, told them that he still saw giants leaping with fantastic gestures on their path, now running along the house roofs, and now dancing on the earth.  Each one of them that night dreamed in his bed of devils.[367]

The interest of this incident is almost wholly picturesque.  It throws but little light upon the superstitions of the age.[368] The magnitude of the Colosseum, the popular legends concerning its magical origin, and the terrible uses of blood to which it had been put, invested this building with peculiar mystery.  Robbers haunted the huge caves.  Rubbish and weeds choked the passages.  Sickly trees soared up from darkness into light among the porches, and the moon peered through the empty vomitories.  If we call imagination to our aid, and place the necromancers and their brazier in the centre of this space;—­if we fancy the priest’s chaunted spells, the sacred names invoked in his unholy rites, the shuddering terror of the conscience-stricken accomplices, and Cellini with defiant mien but quailing heart, we can well believe that he saw more than the amphitheatre contained.  Whether the spectres were projected by the conjurer from a magic lantern on the smoke that issued from his heaps of blazing wood, so that the volumes of vapour, agitated by the wind and rolling in thick spirals, showed them retreating and advancing, and varying in shape and number, is a matter for conjecture.  Cellini firmly believed that he had been environed by living squadrons of the spirits of the damned.

The next four years were spent by Cellini chiefly in Rome, in peril of his life at several seasons, owing to the animosity of Pier Luigi Farnese.  One journey he took at this period to Venice, passing through Ferrara, where he came to blows with the Florentine exiles.  It is interesting to find the respectable historian Jacopo Nardi involved, if only as a peacemaker, in this affray.[369] He also visited Florence and cast dies for Alessandro’s silver coinage.  It was here that he found opportunities of observing the perilous intimacy between the Duke of Civita di Penna and his cousin—­quel pazzo malinconico filosofo di Lorenzino.[370] In April 1537, having quarrelled with the Pope, who seems to have adopted Pier Luigi’s prejudice against him, Cellini set out for France with two of his workmen.  They passed through Florence, Bologna, Venice, and Padua, staying in the last place to model a medallion portrait