Bottini presents us with a full-blown speech, intended to prove Pompilia’s innocence, though really in every word a confession of her utter depravity.  His sole purpose is to show off his cleverness, and he brings forward objections on purpose to prove how well he can turn them off; assumes guilt for the purpose of arguing it into comparative innocence.

      “Yet for the sacredness of argument, ... 
      Anything, anything to let the wheels
      Of argument run glibly to their goal!”

He pretends to “paint a saint,” whom he can still speak of, in tones of earnest admiration, as “wily as an eel.”  His implied concessions and merely parenthetic denials, his abominable insinuations and suggestions, come, evidently enough, from the instincts of a grovelling mind, literally incapable of appreciating goodness, as well as from professional irritation at one who will

      “Leave a lawyer nothing to excuse,
      Reason away and show his skill about.”

The whole speech is a capital bit of satire and irony; it is comically clever and delightfully exasperating.

After the lawyers have spoken, we have the final judgment, the summing-up and laying bare of the whole matter, fact and motive, in the soliloquy of The Pope.  Guido has been tried and found guilty, but, on appeal, the case had been referred to the Pope, Innocent XII.  His decision is made; he has been studying the case from early morning, and now, at the

                             “Dim
      Droop of a sombre February day,
      In the plain closet where he does such work,
      With, from all Peter’s treasury, one stool,
      One table and one lathen crucifix,”

he passes the actors of the tragedy in one last review, nerving himself to pronounce the condemnation which he feels, as judge, to be due, but which he shrinks from with the natural shrinking of an aged man about to send a strong man to death before him.  Pompilia he pronounces faultless and more,—­

“My rose, I gather for the breast of God;”

Caponsacchi, not all without fault, yet a true soldier of God, prompt, for all his former seeming frivolousness, to spring forward and redress the wrong, victorious, too, over temptation:—­

                  “Was the trial sore? 
      Temptation sharp?  Thank God a second time! 
      Why comes temptation but for man to meet
      And master and make crouch beneath his foot,
      And so be pedestalled in triumph?  Pray
      ‘Lead us into no such temptation, Lord!’
      Yea, but, O Thou, whose servants are the bold,
      Lead such temptations by the head and hair,
      Reluctant dragons, up to who dares fight,
      That so he may do battle and have praise!”

For Guido he can see no excuse, can find no loophole for mercy, and but little hope of penitence or salvation, and he signs the death-warrant.