upon the leaders of the hosts of hell. The whole hollow
space now filled with phantoms, surging up by legions, rushing down from
the galleries, issuing from subterranean caverns, and wheeling to and fro
with signs of fury. All the party, says Cellini, were thrown into
consternation, except himself, who, though terribly afraid, kept up the
fainting spirits of the rest. At last the conjurer summoned courage to
inquire when Cellini might hope to be restored to his lost love,
Angelica;--for this was the trivial object of the incantation. The demons
answered (how we are not told) that he would meet her ere a month had
passed away. This prophecy, as it happened, was fulfilled. Then they
redoubled their attacks; the necromancer kept crying out that the peril
was most imminent, until the matin bells of Rome swung through the
darkness, freeing them at last from fear. As they walked home, the boy,
holding the Sicilian by his robe and Benvenuto by his mantle, told them
that he still saw giants leaping with fantastic gestures on their path,
now running along the house roofs, and now dancing on the earth. Each one
of them that night dreamed in his bed of devils.[367]

The interest of this incident is almost wholly picturesque. It throws but
little light upon the superstitions of the age.[368] The magnitude of the
Colosseum, the popular legends concerning its magical origin, and the
terrible uses of blood to which it had been put, invested this building
with peculiar mystery. Robbers haunted the huge caves. Rubbish and weeds
choked the passages. Sickly trees soared up from darkness into light among
the porches, and the moon peered through the empty vomitories. If we call
imagination to our aid, and place the necromancers and their brazier in
the centre of this space;--if we fancy the priest's chaunted spells, the
sacred names invoked in his unholy rites, the shuddering terror of the
conscience-stricken accomplices, and Cellini with defiant mien but
quailing heart, we can well believe that he saw more than the amphitheatre
contained. Whether the spectres were projected by the conjurer from a
magic lantern on the smoke that issued from his heaps of blazing wood, so
that the volumes of vapour, agitated by the wind and rolling in thick
spirals, showed them retreating and advancing, and varying in shape and
number, is a matter for conjecture. Cellini firmly believed that he had
been environed by living squadrons of the spirits of the damne