kind of men this harsh and gloomy nation loved to celebrate as heroes.  This is not the place either to criticise these legends or to recount them at full length.  The most famous and the most characteristic may, however, be briefly told.  On one occasion, after a victory over the Genoese, he sent a message that the captives in his hands should be released if their wives and sisters came to sue for them.  The Genoese ladies embarked, and arrived in Corsica, and to Giudice’s nephew was intrusted the duty of fulfilling his uncle’s promise.  In the course of executing his commission, the youth was so smitten with the beauty of one of the women that he dishonoured her.  Thereupon Giudice had him at once put to death.  Another story shows the Spartan justice of this hero in a less savage light.  He was passing by a cowherd’s cottage, when he heard some young calves bleating.  On inquiring what distressed them, he was told that the calves had not enough milk to drink after the farm people had been served.  Then Giudice made it a law that the calves throughout the land should take their fill before the cows were milked.

Sampiero belongs to a later period of Corsican history.  After a long course of misgovernment the Genoese rule had become unbearable.  There was no pretence of administering justice, and private vengeance had full sway in the island.  The sufferings of the nation were so great that the time had come for a new judge or saviour to rise among them.  Sampiero was the son of obscure parents who lived at Bastelica.  But his abilities very soon declared themselves, and made a way for him in the world.  He spent his youth in the armies of the Medici and of the French Francis, gaining great renown as a brave soldier.  Bayard became his friend, and Francis made him captain of his Corsican bands.  But Sampiero did not forget the wrongs of his native land while thus on foreign service.  He resolved, if possible, to undermine the power of Genoa, and spent the whole of his manhood and old age in one long struggle with their great captain, Stephen Doria.  Of his stern patriotism and Roman severity of virtue the following story is a terrible illustration.  Sampiero, though a man of mean birth, had married an heiress of the noble Corsican house of the Ornani.  His wife, Vannina, was a woman of timid and flexible nature, who, though devoted to her husband, fell into the snares of his enemies.  During his absence on an embassy to Algiers the Genoese induced her to leave her home at Marseilles and to seek refuge in their city, persuading her that this step would secure the safety of her child.  She was starting on her journey when a friend of Sampiero arrested her, and brought her back to Aix, in Provence.  Sampiero, when he heard of these events, hurried to France, and was received by a relative of his, who hinted that he had known of Vannina’s projected flight.  ’E tu hai taciuto?’ was Sampiero’s only answer, accompanied by a stroke of his poignard