light to muse over the pages of Dante
and Ariosto, to sing to the lute and to write in the facile flowing
rhyme of his native Italian the fancies of the dream-land of his youth.

He was the younger brother of the family,--the favorite son and
companion of his mother, who, being of a tender and religious nature,
had brought him up in habits of the most implicit reverence and devotion
for the institutions of his fathers.

The storm which swept over his house, and blasted all his worldly
prospects, blasted, too, and withered all those religious hopes and
beliefs by which alone sensitive and affectionate natures can be healed
of the wounds of adversity without leaving distortion or scar. For his
house had been overthrown, his elder brother cruelly and treacherously
murdered, himself and his retainers robbed and cast out, by a man who
had the entire sanction and support of the Head of the Christian
Church, the Vicar of Christ on Earth. So said the current belief of his
times,--the faith in which his sainted mother died; and the difficulty
with which a man breaks away from such ties is in exact proportion to
the refinement and elevation of his nature.

In the mind of our young nobleman there was a double current. He was a
Roman, and the traditions of his house went back to the time of Mutius
Scaevola; and his old nurse had often told him that grand story of how
the young hero stood with his right hand in the fire rather than betray
his honor. If the legends of Rome's ancient heroes cause the pulses of
colder climes and alien races to throb with sympathetic heroism, what
must their power be to one who says, "_These were my fathers_"? Agostino
read Plutarch, and thought, "_I_, too, am a Roman!"--and then he looked
on the power that held sway over the Tarpeian Rock and the halls of the
old "Sanctus Senatus," and asked himself, "By what right does it hold
these?" He knew full well that in the popular belief all those hardy
and virtuous old Romans whose deeds of heroism so transported him were
burning in hell for the crime of having been born before Christ; and he
asked himself, as he looked on the horrible and unnatural luxury
and vice which defiled the Papal chair and ran riot through every
ecclesiastical order, whether such men, without faith, without
conscience, and without even decency, were indeed the only authorized
successors of Christ and his Apostles?

To us, of course, from our modern stand-point, the question has an