the guilty nuns, and forwarded it to Rome.  Their sentence was as follows:  Sister Orizia condemned to incarceration for life, and loss of all her privileges; Sister Umilia, to the same penalties for a term of seven years; Sisters Paola, Cherubina, and Dionea, received a lighter punishment.  Orizia, it may be mentioned, had written a letter with her own blood to some lover; but nothing leads us to suppose that she was equally guilty with Umilia, who had entered into the plot to poison Sister Calidonia.

Umilia was duly immured, and bore her punishment until the year 1616, at which time the sentence expired.  But she was not released for another two years; for she persistently refused to humble herself, or to request that liberation as a grace which was her due in justice.  Nor would she submit to the shame of being seen about the convent without her monastic habit.  Finally, in 1618, she obtained freedom and restoration to her privileges as a nun of S. Chiara.  It may be added, as a last remark, that, when the convent was being set to rights, Umilia’s portrait in the character of S. Ursula was ordered to be destroyed, or rendered fit for devout uses by alterations.  Any nun who kept it in her cell incurred the penalty of excommunication.  In what year Umilia died remains unknown.

* * * * *

The Cenci.

Shifting the scene to Rome, we light upon a group of notable misdeeds enacted in the last half of the sixteenth century, each of which is well calculated to illustrate the conditions of society and manners at that epoch.  It may be well to begin with the Cenci tragedy.  In Shelley’s powerful drama, in Guerrazzi’s tedious novel, and Scolari’s digest, the legend of Beatrice Cenci has long appealed to modern sympathy.  The real facts, extracted from legal documents and public registers, reduce its poetry of horror to comparatively squalid prose.[196] Yet, shorn of romantic glamour, the bare history speaks significantly to a student of Italian customs.  Monsignore Cristoforo Cenci, who died about the year 1562, was in holy orders, yet not a priest.  One of the clerks of the Apostolic Camera, a Canon of S. Peter’s, the titular incumbent of a Roman parish, and an occupant of minor offices about the Papal Court and Curia, he represented an epicene species, neither churchman nor layman, which the circumstances of ecclesiastical sovereignty rendered indispensable.  Cristoforo belonged to a good family among that secondary Roman aristocracy which ranked beneath the princely feudatories and the Papal bastards.  He accumulated large sums of money by maladministration of his official trusts, inherited the estates of two uncles, and bequeathed a colossal fortune to his son Francesco.  This youth was the offspring of an illicit connection carried on between Monsignore Cenci and Beatrice Amias during the lifetime of that lady’s husband.  Upon the death of the husband the Monsignore obtained dispensation from his orders, married Beatrice, and legitimated his son, the inheritor of so much wealth.  Francesco was born in 1549, and had therefore reached the age of thirteen when his father died.  His mother, Beatrice, soon contracted a third matrimonial union; but during her guardianship of the boy she appeared before the courts, accused of having stolen clothing from his tutor’s wardrobe.