to correct his children (and indeed on this occasion correction was abundantly deserved by the insolent demeanour of Luigi) could be considered to provoke his son by a slight personal chastisement.”  The son, by the way, was over one and twenty, a fact to which no allusion is made.  As “a forlorn hope,” in the words of the sentence, the counsel for the defence asserted, that whatever the crime of the prisoner might be, it was not parricide, from the simple fact that Luigi was not Venanzio’s son.  The facts of the case appear to have been, that Maria Rosa Battistoni being then unmarried, gave birth in July 1835 to a son, who was the prisoner at the bar; that shortly afterwards the vicar of Cannara gave information to the Episcopal court of Assisi, that Maria Rosa had been seduced by Venanzio Bonci and had had an illegitimate child by him; that, in consequence, a formal requisition was addressed by the above court to Venanzio, and that he thereupon acknowledged the paternity of the child, and expressed his readiness to marry the mother.  The marriage was therefore solemnized, and the child entered in the church-books as the legitimized son of Venanzio and Maria Bonci, in June, 1836.  Against this strong presumptive evidence of paternity, and the natural inference to be drawn from the child having been brought up and educated as Venanzio’s son, there were only, we are told, to be set, alleged expressions of doubt on the father’s part, when in a passion, as to his being really the father, and also certain confessions of the mother to different parties, that Luigi was not the child of her husband.  All these confessions however, so it is asserted, were proved to be subsequent in date to the son’s arrest, and therefore, probably, made with a view to save his life.  The plea is in consequence rejected.

No defence was attempted to the second count.  Both charges are therefore declared fully proved; and as the punishment for parricide is public execution, and the penalty for having in one’s possession (a lighter offence by the way, than using) any weapon without special license, consists of imprisonment from two to twelve months, and of a fine from five to sixty scudi, therefore the court “condemns Luigi Bonci for the first count, to be publicly executed in Cannara, and to make compensation to the heirs of the murdered man, according to the valuation of the civil tribunals, and to pay the cost of the trial; and on the second count, the court” (with a pedantic mockery of mercy) “considers the first three months of the incarceration the prisoner has already undergone to be sufficient punishment, coupled with a fine of five scudi and the loss of the weapon.”

This summary will, I fear, give the reader too favourable an opinion of the original sentence.  In order to make the story at all intelligible, I have had to pick out my facts, from a perfect labyrinth of sentences and parentheses.  All I, or any one else can state is, that these seem to be the facts, which seem to have been proved by the witnesses.  What the character of the evidence was, or what was the relative credibility of the witnesses, whose very names I know not, or how far their assertions were borne out or contradicted by circumstantial proof, are all matters on which (though the whole character of the crime depends on them) I can form no opinion whatever.