that killed the lukewarm cousin.  Sampiero now brought his wife from Aix to Marseilles, preserving the most absolute silence on the way, and there, on entering his house, he killed her with his own hand.  It is said that he loved Vannina passionately; and when she was dead, he caused her to be buried with magnificence in the church of S. Francis.  Like Giudice, Sampiero fell at last a prey to treachery.  The murder of Vannina had made the Ornani his deadly foes.  In order to avenge her blood, they played into the hands of the Genoese, and laid a plot by which the noblest of the Corsicans was brought to death.  First, they gained over to their scheme a monk of Bastelica, called Ambrogio, and Sampiero’s own squire and shield-bearer, Vittolo.  By means of these men, in whom he trusted, he was drawn defenceless and unattended into a deeply wooded ravine near Cavro, not very far from his birthplace, where the Ornani and their Genoese troops surrounded him.  Sampiero fired his pistols in vain, for Vittolo had loaded them with the shot downwards.  Then he drew his sword, and began to lay about him, when the same Vittolo, the Judas, stabbed him from behind, and the old lion fell dead by his friend’s hand.  Sampiero was sixty-nine when he died, in the year 1567.  It is satisfactory to know that the Corsicans have called traitors and foes to their country Vittoli for ever.  These two examples of Corsican patriots are enough; we need not add to theirs the history of Paoli—­a milder and more humane, but scarcely less heroic leader.  Paoli, however, in the hour of Corsica’s extremest peril, retired to England, and died in philosophic exile.  Neither Giudice nor Sampiero would have acted thus.  The more forlorn the hope, the more they struggled.

Among the old Corsican customs which are fast dying out, but which still linger in the remote valleys of Niolo and Vico, is the vocero, or funeral chant, improvised by women at funerals over the bodies of the dead.  Nothing illustrates the ferocious temper and savage passions of the race better than these voceri, many of which have been written down and preserved.  Most of them are songs of vengeance and imprecation, mingled with hyperbolical laments and utterances of extravagant grief, poured forth by wives and sisters at the side of murdered husbands and brothers.  The women who sing them seem to have lost all milk of human kindness, and to have exchanged the virtues of their sex for Spartan fortitude and the rage of furies.  While we read their turbid lines we are carried in imagination to one of the cheerless houses of Bastelica or Bocognano, overshadowed by its mournful chestnut-tree, on which the blood of the murdered man is yet red.  The gridata, or wake, is assembled in a dark room.  On the wooden board, called tola, the corpse lies stretched; and round it are women, veiled in the blue-black mantle of Corsican costume, moaning and rocking themselves upon their chairs.  The