This speech was one of his happiest inspirations.  Instantly it echoed from mouth to mouth; from end to end of his dominions.  Enough of bloodshed for one day!  That showed his true heart, the people declared.  Enough of bloodshed!  Their enthusiasm grew wilder when, in an access of princely graciousness, he repaired the lamentable excess of zeal by pinning the Order of the Golden Vine to the offending officer’s breast; it rose to a veritable frenzy as soon as they learned that, by Letters Patent, the entire defunct squadron had been posthumously ennobled.  And this is only one of many occasions on which this ruler, by his intimate knowledge of human nature and the arts of government, was enabled to wrest good from evil, and thereby consolidate his throne. . . .

It is passing strange, on the face of it, that this vivid personality, one of the most arresting figures in the history of the country, should be so briefly dealt with in the pages of Monsignor Perrelli.  Doubly strange, and a serious disappointment to the reader, in view of the fact that the two men were contemporaries, and that the learned writer must have enjoyed exceptional facilities for obtaining first-hand knowledge of his subject.  Almost inexplicable indeed, when one remembers those maxims which he himself, in the Introduction to his antiquities, lays down for the writing of history; when one calls to mind his own gleams of exotic scholarship, those luminous asides and fruitful digressions, those statesmanlike comments on things in general which make his work not so much a compendium of local lore as a mirror of the polite learning of his age.  It is no exaggeration to say that, compared with the ample treatment meted out to inconspicuous rulers like Alfonso the Seventeenth or Florizel the Fat, his account of the Good Duke Alfred is the baldest, the most perfunctory and conventional of chronicles.  Neither good nor evil is related of him.  There is nothing but a monotonous enumeration of events.

It was the bibliographer who, poring over the pages of the rival monk Father Capocchio, that audacious and salacious friar already mentioned—­it was the bibliographer who hit upon a passage which suggested a solution of the mystery and proved that, though Monsignor Perrelli lived during the reign of the Good Duke, it would be stretching unduly the sense of a plain word to say that he “flourished” under his rule.  Other persons may have flourished; not so the kindly prelate.

“Nothing whatever,” says this implacable enemy of Nepenthe, “is to be recorded to the credit of the sanguinary brigand—­so he terms the Good Duke—­nothing whatsoever:  save and except only this, that he cut off the ears of a certain prattler, intriguer, and snuff-taking sensualist called Perrelli who, under the pretence of collecting data for an alleged historical treatise, profited by his priestly garb to play fast and loose with what little remained of decent family life on