crucifix of Crema and to bear it till his death.  A long procession of war-loving Pontiffs, levying armies and paying captains with the pence of S. Peter, in order to keep by arms the lands they had acquired by fraud, defiles before our eyes.  First goes the terrible Sixtus IV., who died of grief when news was brought him that the Italian princes had made peace.  He it was who sanctioned the conspiracy to murder the Medici in church, at the moment of the elevation of the Host.  The brigands hired to do this work refused at the last moment.  The sacrilege appalled them.  ‘Then,’ says the chronicler, ’was found a priest, who, being used to churches, had no scruple.’  The poignard this priest carried was this crucifix of Crema.  After Sixtus came the blood-stained Borgia; and after him Julius II., whom the Romans in triumphal songs proclaimed a second Mars, and who turned, as Michelangelo expressed it, the chalices of Rome into swords and helms.  Leo X., who dismembered Italy for his brother and nephew; and Clement VII., who broke the neck of Florence and delivered the Eternal City to the spoiler, follow.  Of the antinomy between the Vicariate of Christ and an earthly kingdom, incarnated by these and other Holy Fathers, what symbol could be found more fitting than a dagger with a crucifix for case and covering?

It is not easy to think or write of these matters without rhetoric.  When I laid my head upon my pillow that night in the Albergo del Pozzo at Crema, it was full of such thoughts; and when at last sleep came, it brought with it a dream begotten doubtless by the perturbation of my fancy.  For I thought that a brown Franciscan, with hollow cheeks, and eyes aflame beneath his heavy cowl, sat by my bedside, and, as he raised the crucifix in his lean quivering hands, whispered a tale of deadly passion and of dastardly revenge.  His confession carried me away to a convent garden of Palermo; and there was love in the story, and hate that is stronger than love, and, for the ending of the whole matter, remorse which dies not even in the grave.  Each new possessor of the crucifix of Crema, he told me, was forced to hear from him in dreams his dreadful history.  But, since it was a dream and nothing more, why should I repeat it?  I have wandered far enough already from the vintage and the sunny churches of the little Lombard town.

* * * * *

CHERUBINO AT THE SCALA THEATRE

I

It was a gala night.  The opera-house of Milan was one blaze of light and colour.  Royalty in field-marshal’s uniform and diamonds, attended by decorated generals and radiant ladies of the court, occupied the great box opposite the stage.  The tiers from pit to gallery were filled with brilliantly dressed women.  From the third row, where we were fortunately placed, the curves of that most beautiful of theatres presented to my gaze a series of retreating