ting 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.

"For the main criminal I have no hope
Except in such a suddenness of fate.
I stood at Naples once, a night so dark,
I could have scarce conjectured there was earth
Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all:
But the night's black was burst through by a blaze--
Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore,
Through her whole length of mountain visible:
There lay the city thick and