e of history is always going to pieces. Where motives are
obscure, he prefers to contemplate causes in their effects, and to look
abroad over his vast horizon of unquestioned reality. The difference
between outward and interior history will be felt by any one who
compares the story of Dolcino here given with the account in Neander.
Mr. Lea knows more about him and has better materials than the ponderous
professor of pectoral theology. But he has not all Neander's patience
and power to read significance and sense in the musings of a reckless
erratic mind.

He believes that Pope Gregory IX. is the intellectual originator, as
well as the legislative imponent, of the terrific system which ripened
gradually and experimentally in his pontificate. It does not appear
whether he has read, or knows through Havet the investigations which
conducted Ficker to a different hypothesis. The transition of 1231 from
the saving of life to the taking of life by fire was nearly the sharpest
that men can conceive, and in pursuance of it the subsequent legal forms
are mere detail. The spirit and practice of centuries were renounced for
the opposite extreme; and between the mercy of 1230 and the severity of
1231 there was no intervening stage of graduated rigour. Therefore it is
probable that the new idea of duty, foreign to Italian and specifically
to Roman ways, was conveyed by a new man, that a new influence just then
got possession of the Pope. Professor Ficker signals Guala as the real
contriver of the _regime_ of terror, and the man who acquired the
influence imported the idea and directed the policy. Guala was a
Dominican prior whom the Pope trusted in emergencies. In the year 1230
he negotiated the treaty of San Germano between Frederic II. and the
Church, and was made Bishop of Brescia. In that year Brescia, first
among Italian cities, inserted in its statutes the emperor's Lombard law
of 1224, which sent the heretic to the stake. The inference is that the
Dominican prelate caused its insertion, and that nobody is so likely to
have expounded its available purport to the pontiff as the man who had
so lately caused it to be adopted in his own see, and who stood high
just then in merit and in favour. That Guala was bishop-elect on 28th
August, half a year before the first burnings at Rome, we know; that he
caused the adoption of Frederic's law at Brescia or at Rome is not in
evidence. Of that abrupt and unexplained enactment little is told