nobles,--and many others after him, just
and unjust, whirled through the clear air to violent destruction for
their bad or their good deeds, as justice or injustice chanced to be in
the ascendant of the hour. And then, in the Middle Age, the
sweet-scented garden was the place of terrible executions, and the
gallows stood there permanently for many years, and men were hanged and
drawn and quartered there, week by week, month by month, all the year
round, the chief magistrate of Rome looking on from the window of the
Senator's palace, as a duty; till one of them sickened at the sight of
blood, and ordained that justice should be done at the Bridge of Sant'
Angelo, and at Tor di Nona, and in the castle itself, and the summit of
the fatal rock was left to the birds, the wild flowers, and the merciful
purity of nature. And that happened four hundred years ago.

Until our own time there were prisons deep down in the old Roman vaults.
At first, as in old days, the place of confinement was in the Mamertine
prison, on the southeastern slope, beneath which was the hideous
Tullianum, deepest and darkest of all, whence no captive ever came out
alive to the upper air again. In the Middle Age, the prison was below
the vaults of the Roman Tabularium on the side of the Forum, but it is
said that the windows looked inward upon a deep court of the Senator's
palace. As civilization advanced, it was transferred a story higher, to
a more healthy region of the building, but the Capitoline prison was not
finally given up till the reign of Pius the Ninth, at which time it had
become a place of confinement for debtors only.

Institutions and parties in Rome have always had a tendency to cling to
places more than in other cities. It is thus that during so many
centuries the Lateran was the headquarters of the Popes, the Capitol
the rallying-place of the ever-smouldering republicanism of the people,
and the Castle of Sant' Angelo the seat of actual military power as
contrasted with spiritual dominion and popular aspiration. So far as the
latter is concerned its vitality is often forgotten and its vigour
underestimated.

One must consider the enormous odds against which the spirit of popular
emancipation had to struggle in order to appreciate the strength it
developed. A book has been written called 'The One Hundred and Sixty-one
rebellions of papal subjects between 896 and 1859'--a title which gives
an average of about sixteen to a century; an