man, which he leaves when he creeps through the crevice in the wall of the vault. But Sordello, whom they soon afterwards laid in that same old font-tomb -alas! he had aimed at a life for which his nature was never meant. 606. 'the two eagles.' "Zeus, wishing to ascertain the exact centre of the earth, caused two eagles to fly at the same time at equal speed from the eastern and western ends of the earth. They met at Delphi, which was therefore regarded as the centre. Two golden eagles were therefore set up in the temple of Apollo there." (See J. G. Frazer's Pausanias, vol. v. p. 315.) Through a round of 'much tribulation' Sordello learned the truth which Eglamor knew from the beginning, and by which he was blessed all through his career. The illustration is very obscurely expressed. The world is regarded as a sphere. Do both spirits go round it? Love is the centre where they meet, but Eglamor was never away from love. 616. 'some spent swimmer's.' "A solitary shriek, the bubbling cry Of some strong swimmer in his agony." -Byron's Don Juan. 621. 'the hermit-bee.' "I once saw a solitary bee nipping a leaf round till it exactly fitted the front of a hole; his nest, no doubt; or tomb, perhaps. . . . Well, it seemed awful to watch that bee-he seemed so instantly from the teaching of God." (Letters, vol. i. p. 371.) It is one of the Megachile species, the members of which are furnished with a scissor-like apparatus. The female (not 'he') cuts longitudinal strips and perfect circles out of leaves, and with these she builds in a crevice a line of cells, shaped somewhat like thimbles, in which she deposits her eggs. 'By this.' Before the hour of Sordello's death. Ll. 633-681. After Sordello's death Taurello Salinguerra sinks back into Romano, and his relation to the poet is hushed up. And now is it worth our while to remember, let alone record, how Salinguerra extricated himself without Sor 633-655. After Sor dello's death, Taurello abandons independent action; 655-673. dello ? The minstrel gone, are we not to care whether Ghibellin or Guelf prevailed-whether Count Richard of Verona was left in durance or the Marquis of Este The end of it all, at all thought of paid a ransom for his release? any rate, was peace. Taurello made some frank proposal that prospered, was complimented right and left on its success, and became a nine-days' wonder for statecraft. Then, though so lately he might have made himself supreme, he by one effort blotted out of his mind the great hope of overthrowing the House of Este in the grand style prophesied that mad evening in San Pietro, and, content that the brothers Ecelin and Alberic escaped all blame in connection with the seizure of the Count, sent away the Papal Legate and the envoys of the Lombard League, despatched a letter to the Monk (who heard it out patiently, then curled up his limbs on his wolfskin mat, and never spoke again), and informed the Ferrarese that he retained rule over them only while the two sons were in pupilage. Lastly, there being no other way of keeping safe for Frederick the direct road from Germany to Lombardy-no way, that is, of making sure that whoever should next obtain the dowry of Sophia, the youngest of the tribe of daughters with whom Ecelin II. had been wont to bribe magnates who were jealous of his power (and indeed, since she married Henry of Egna, dead a year ago, the Trentine Pass had remained open to the Emperor)-he, in pure necessity, married her himself. His last chance of building up an independent power for himself being thus gone, he made void all the prophecies of his greatness, and, in spite of his many schemes, open and secret, the deeds of his youth and his age's dreams, was absorbed in Romano. And he so hushed up what happened on the night on which Sordello died that when, among the other woes of Ferrara detailed in an ill-assorted chronicle, there was noted this obscure one of "Salinguerra's only son Giacomo, who died, fatuous and doting, before his father," the citizens were much astonished, and could only wonder which of his five sons by Sophia was meant. Marries 673-681. And gets his relationship to Sordello hushed up. 636. 'without Sordello.' To work for. 668. 'Himself espoused.' This is historical. Sofia was the third of the children of Ecelin II. and Adelaide, Palma being the first, Cunizza the last, Ecelin the fourth, and Alberic the fifth. (Rolandini Chronicon in Muratori's Scriptores Rerum Italicarum.) Ll. 681-796. After Ecelin III. and Alberic have, in their cruel fashion, strengthened the Ghibellin cause, Taurello is taken as a captive to Venice and kept there; and the two brothers, becoming intolerable, meet their death. 681-716. cause pros pers under and Alberic. The jaws of the people's dead hope were slow to collapse and spoil its beautiful features; but these features The Ghibellin waxed duller and duller the next year, when the Guelf leaders withdrew each to his stronghold. Then, at last, Ecelin III. after Monk Ecelin had died at Campese and had been laid to rest at Solagna, with cushioned head and gloved hand to denote the cavalier he was, young Ecelin's heart smote him for his inactivity. He had long since grown up, yet, except for the Vicenza business, what results had he obtained in fire and bloodshed? (It was so hard to pause to tell about him while Sordello was on the scene!) Now he steps on Lombardy as its new lord. In the nick of time, when Ecelin and Alberic have just arranged with Taurello that he shall serve them as he served their father, come news that half the people in Verona refuse allegiance to their Marquis, Azzo of Este, and to Count Richard, and have cast them from a throne which they now bid Ecelin mount as their podestà because of his ancestral worth. Thither he flew, and henceforth the town was wholly his, Taurello sinking down from his temporary headship to his old obscure hard work. Hearing of the acquisition of Verona, Frederick did come to Lombardy, but the old warrior to whom he had sent the badge and rescript stood unnoticed in the background. A year or two later the Ghibellins took 717-727. Old Taurello, 727-745. Captured at Vicenza, and left the Marquis scarcely a nook to hide in; and when two or three hundred Guelfs-vile Bassanese calling themselves 'The Free' conspired to oppose Alberic, Ecelin slaughtered them so easily and in such style that often a little Salinguerra would look up and ask his father how old he would have to be to get appointed his proud uncle's page. Some years later that father had dwindled down to a mere showy, turbulent soldier, still famous—a subtle man, no doubt, but hardly (the people thought) so astute as his contemporaneous friends professed. Undoubtedly he was a brawler; but all his neighbours made allowance for the old fellow, and let him keep his incorrigible ways. Men who suffered through him never fretted: they would have missed the soldier whose name was used to frighten them when boys. "Trap the ostrich," they said, “but suffer our bald osprey to flap a battered wing." Butto bring his story to a close-the old osprey gave one flap too much. The fleet of Venice was interfered with, and there was no overlooking that. Some of the citizens captured him at Ferrara, more by fraud than by force, to tell the truth, as he sat fat and florid at a banquet. Now, there is little credit in helping a man of eighty to his death-fate will soon enough cut through the lifecord whose last threads you fritter away-so, when the veteran was presiding at the head of his own board, with the old smile that was meant to tell you that all went well with Frederick (as if he were likely to tell when it was otherwise), in rushed our friends, made a pretence of fighting, apologised for doing this shame to his old age, gained their galleys, and bore him off to Venice. There he was set down gently, as it were, and left free to go his own way and to look at the square, easy captivity where, if groups of citizens gathered to show their children how the Magnifico, who once almost became a king on the mainland, was going his way among them now, he would pretend to watch the swallows flying their eternal circle between Theodore and Mark. 746-755. Enjoys an at Venice. "In deed," the seniors would remark, "it took Ecelin all his time to supersede that man." 755-796. and death Sordello's inability to put himself openly at the head of the people when the crisis caused by the Imperial Cruelties badge and rescript came-an inability due to the strange of Ecelin belief, which had pervaded his life, that there was and Alberic. nothing worth doing-thrust under Taurello's tutelage Ecelin and Alberic, whom he forthwith bound fast in one rod to baffle God, who loves the world. Thus did Sordello allow the thin, grey, wizened, dwarfish Ecelin and the muscular, big-boned Alberic to give a quick and horrible solution of the minstrel's problem by proving that, wherever there is a will to do, there is plenty to be done, of evil or of good. With unspeakable tortures the two brothers plagued the world; but a touch of the spirit of Hildebrand made some Lombards band together in a crusade against them and, by saving Milan, win the world's applause. Ecelin perished; and I think grass never grew so pleasantly as in Valley Rù, near San Zenon, where Alberic, in his turn, after being regaled on seeing his exasperated captors burn his wife and seven children, was tied to a wild horse and trailed through raunce and bramble-bush. I testify that God laid the villain's castle in ruins. You hear its bell toll from the one tower left by last year's earthquake, which laid low the modern church beneath-no harm in that !—and amid the wild brake above the ruins the grasshopper chirps, the lizard rustles, and the cushats chirre. There, at noontide a week ago, I heard the old Canon say that with his own eyes he saw a mound burst and Alberic's huge skeleton disinterred, only five years before, and he added: "June's the month for carding off the first cocoons spun by our silkworms " two pieces of information, of which neither he nor I could tell which was the worthier of note. You may decide! 692. 'Vicenza's business.' Was he not fulfilling the promise of his babyhood? |