assins loudly beseeching St. Stephen and St. Ambrose to
inspire them with the courage necessary for so noble a deed.

In Florence, the seat of the Muses, they saw the nephew of the great
Cosmo, the father of his country, murdered in the church of Santa
Reparata, at the altar, just at the moment when the priest raised the
host in his hands; for the Archbishop of Florence, Salviati, had informed
the murderers that this was to be the signal. He had been bribed to
assist in this enterprise by the Pope, who was determined to annihilate
the Medicis, in order to rule sole sovereign in Italy.

In the north of Europe they saw wild barbarians and drunken ruffians
murdering and pillaging like the more civilised Europeans. In Spain they
found upon the throne deceit and hypocrisy wearing the mask of religion.
They saw, at an _auto-da-fe_, men and women immolated in the flames to
the mild Deity of the Christians; and they heard the grand inquisitor,
Torquemada, boast to Ferdinand and Isabella that, since the establishment
of the holy tribunal, it had tried eighty thousand suspected persons, and
had burnt six thousand convicted heretics. When Faustus first saw the
ladies and cavaliers assembled in the grand square, dressed in their
richest habits, he imagined that he had come just in time for some joyous
festival; but when he heard the condemned wretches howling and lamenting
in the midst of a mob of monks who were at their devotions, he was
convinced that religion, when misused, makes man the most execrable
monster on the earth. He, however, began to imagine that all these
horrors were the necessary consequences of man's nature, who is an animal
that must either tear his fellow-creatures to pieces, or be torn to
pieces by them.

The Devil, perceiving that Faustus was amazed and confounded by these
scenes, said to him:

"Thou seest how the courts of Europe resemble each other in wickedness
and crime. Let us now go to Rome, and see whether the ecclesiastical
government goes on better."

The malicious Leviathan flattered himself that Alexander the Sixth, who
wore at that time the triple crown, and held in his hands the keys of
heaven and of hell, would give the finishing blow to the harassed spirit
of Faustus, and would enable him to return below with his victim. For a
long time he had been weary of staying on the earth; for although he had
in the course of many thousand years so often traversed it, he still saw
merely the sa