to the neighbors, and promised to make them all Cardinals when he should become the Papal nephew.  Meanwhile he pressed the hermit forward on the path of folly; and this man, driven to his wits’ end for a device, said that they must find seven priests together, one of whom should be assassinated to enforce the spell.  It was natural, while the countryside was being raked for seven convenient priests by such a tattler as Giacomo, that suspicions should be generated in the people.  Information reached Rome, in consequence of which the persons implicated in this idiotic plot were conveyed thither and given over to the mercies of the Holy Office.  The upshot of their trial was that Giacomo lost his head, while the hermit and Fra Cherubino were burned alive, and Fra Domenico went to the galleys for life.  Several other men involved in the process received punishments of considerable severity.  It must be added in conclusion that the whole story rests upon the testimony of Inquisitorial archives, and that the real method of Giacomo Centini’s apparent madness yet remains to be investigated.  The few facts that we know about him, from his behavior on the scaffold and a letter he wrote his wife, prejudice me in his favor.

Enough, and more than enough, perhaps, has been collected in this chapter, to throw light upon the manners of Italians during the Counter-Reformation.  It would have been easy to repeat the story of the Countess of Cellant and her murdered lovers, or of the Duchess of Amalfi strangled by her brothers for a marriage below her station.  The massacres committed by the Raspanti in Ravenna would furnish a whole series of illustrative crimes.  From the deeds of Alfonso Piccolomini, Sciarra and Fabrizio Colonna details sufficient to fill a volume with records of atrocious savagery could be drawn.  The single episode of Elena Campireali, who plighted her troth to a bandit, became Abbess of the Convent at Castro, intrigued with a bishop, and killed herself for shame on the return of her first lover, would epitomize in one drama all the principal features of this social discord.  The dreadful tale of the Baron of Montebello might be told again, who assaulted the castle of the Marquis of Pratidattolo, and, by the connivance of a sister whom he subsequently married, murdered the Marquis with his mother, children, and relatives.  The hunted life of Alessandro Antelminelli, pursued through all the States of Europe by assassins, could be used to exemplify the miseries of proscribed exiles.  But what is the use of multiplying instances, when every pedigree in Litta, every chronicle of the time, every history of the most insignificant township, swarms with evidence to the same purpose?  We need not adopt the opinion that society had greatly altered for the worse.  We must rather decide that mediaeval ferocity survived throughout the whole of that period which witnessed the Catholic Revival, and that the piety which distinguished it was not influential in curbing vehement passions.