the island in check.  A still greater number were held by French feudatories; the standing troops were collected and in arms; and the feudal militia, composed in great part of foreign subfeudatories, waited only the signal to assemble.  In such a posture of affairs, which the foresight of the prudent would never have selected for an outbreak, the officers of Charles continued to grind down the Sicilian people, satisfied that their patience would endure forever.

New outrages shed a gloom over the festival of Easter at Palermo, the ancient capital of the kingdom, detested by the strangers more than any other city as being the strongest and the most deeply injured.  Messina was the seat of the King’s viceroy in Sicily, Herbert of Orleans; Palermo was governed by the Justiciary of Val di Mazzara, John of St. Remigio, a minister worthy of Charles.  His subalterns, worthy both of the Justiciary and of the King, had recently launched out into fresh acts of rapine and violence.  But the people submitted.  It even went so far that the citizens of Palermo, seeking comfort from God amid their worldly tribulations, and having entered a church to pray, in that very church, on the days sacred to the memory of the Saviour’s passion, and amid the penitential rites, were exposed to the most cruel outrages.  The ban-dogs of the exchequer searched out among them those who had failed in the payment of the taxes, dragged them forth from the sacred edifice, manacled, and bore them to prison, crying out, insultingly, before the multitude attracted to the spot, “Pay, faterini, pay!” And the people still submitted.

The Monday after Easter, which fell on the 30th of March, there was a festival at the Church of Santo Spirito.  On that occasion a heinous outrage against the liberties of the Sicilians afforded the impulse, and the patience of the people gave way.

Half a mile from the southern wall of the city, on the brink of the ravine of Oreto, stands a church dedicated to the Holy Ghost, concerning which the Latin fathers have not failed to record that on the day on which the first stone of it was laid, in the twelfth century, the sun was darkened by an eclipse.  On one side of it were the precipice and the river; on the other, the plain extending to the city, which in the present day is in great part divided by walls and dotted with gardens; while a square enclosure of moderate size, shaded by dusky cypresses, honeycombed with tombs, and adorned with urns and other sepulchral monuments, surrounds the church.  This is a public cemetery, laid out toward the end of the eighteenth century, and fearfully filled in three weeks by the dire pestilence which devastated Sicily in 1837.  On the Tuesday following Easter, at the hour of vespers, religion and custom drew crowds of people to this cheerful plain, then carpeted with the flowers of spring.  Citizens, wending their way toward the church, divided into numerous groups.  They walked, sat in clusters, spread the tables, or danced upon the grass; and—­whether it were a defect or a merit of the Sicilian character—­threw off, for the moment, the recollection of their sufferings.