at what women felt whose
husbands and sons, going out for a stroll of an afternoon, in the
streets of Rome, might as likely as not be brought home dead of a dozen
sword-wounds before evening. A husband, a father, was stabbed in the
dark by treachery; try and imagine the daily and year-long sensations of
the widowed mother, bringing up her only son deliberately to kill her
husband's murderer; teaching him to look upon vengeance as the first,
most real and most honourable aim of life, from the time he was old
enough to speak, to the time when he should be strong enough to kill.
Everything was earnest then. One should remember that most of the
stories told by Boccaccio, Sacchetti and Bandello--the stories from
which Shakespeare got his Italian plays, his Romeo and Juliet, his
Merchant of Venice--were not inventions, but were founded on the truth.
Everyone has read about Caesar Borgia, his murders, his treacheries and
his end, and he is held up to us as a type of monstrous wickedness. But
a learned Frenchman, Emile Gebhart, has recently written a rather
convincing treatise, to show that Caesar Borgia was not a monster at all,
nor even much of an exception to the general rule among the Italian
despots of his day, and his day was civilized compared with that of
Rienzi, of Boniface the Eighth, of Sciarra Colonna.

In order to understand anything about the real life of the Middle Age,
one should begin at the beginning; one should see the dwellings, the
castles, and the palaces with their furniture and arrangements, one
should realize the stern necessities as well as the few luxuries of that
time. And one should make acquaintance with the people themselves, from
the grey-haired old baron, the head of the house, down to the scullery
man and the cellarer's boy and the stable lads. And then, knowing
something of the people and their homes, one might begin to learn
something about their household occupations, their tremendously tragic
interests and their few and simple amusements.

[Illustration: PORTA SAN LORENZO]

The first thing that strikes one about the dwellings is the enormous
strength of those that remain. The main idea, in those days, when a man
built a house, was to fortify himself and his belongings against attacks
from the outside, and every other consideration was secondary to that.
That is true not only of the Barons' castles in the country and of their
fortified palaces in town,--which were castles, too, for that