Of course Lord Boniface had his wars.  There was a plot to depose him discovered in Mantua, and the plotters fled to Verona.  Boniface demanded them; but the Veronese answered stoutly that theirs was a free city, and no man should be taken from it against his will.  Boniface marched to attack them; and the Veronese were such fools as to call the Duke of Austria to their aid, promising submission to his government in return for his help.  It was then that Austria first put her finger into the Italian pasticcio, where she kept it so many centuries.  But the Austrian governor whom the Duke set over the Veronese made himself intolerable,—­the Austrian governor always does,—­and they drove him out of the city.  On this the Duke turns about, unites with Boniface, takes Verona and sacks it.

An altogether pleasanter incident of Boniface’s domination was the miraculous discovery of the sacred relics, buried and lost during the sack of Mantua by the Hungarians.  The place of sepulture was revealed thrice to a blind pauper in a dream.  People dug where he bade them and found the relics.  Immediately on its exhumation the Blood wrought innumerable miracles; and the fame of it grew so great, that the Pope came to see it, attended by such concourse of the people that they were obliged to sleep in the streets.  It was an age that drew the mantle of exterior devotion and laborious penances and pilgrimages over the most hideous crimes and unnatural sins.  But perhaps the poor believers who slept in the streets of Mantua on that occasion were none the worse for their faith when the Pope pronounced the Blood genuine and blessed it.  I am sure that for some days of enthusiasm they abstained from the violence of war, and paused a little in that career of vice and wickedness of which one reads in Italian history, with the full conviction that Sodom and Gomorrah also were facts, and not merely allegory.  I have no doubt that the blind beggar believed that Heaven had revealed to him the place where the Blood was buried, that the Pope believed in the verity of the relic, and that the devout multitudes were helped and uplifted in their gross faith by this visible witness to the truth that Christ had died for them upon the bloody tree.  Poor souls! they had much to contend with in the way to any good.  The leaven of the old pleasure-making pagan civilization was in them yet (it is in the Italians to this day); and centuries of Northern invasion had made them fierce and cruel, without teaching them Northern virtues.  Nay, I question much if their invaders had so many rugged virtues to teach as some people would have us think.  They seem to have liked well the sweet corruptions of the land, and the studied debaucheries of ages of sin, and to have enjoyed them as furiously and clumsily as bears do the hoarded honey of civilized bees.