unknown to her, burst out from all the other faces at the Love Court.

'I was vainly planning how to make you mine,' she says, 'when Salinguerra showed me how to break. loose from Count Richard and the Guelfs. My father and brothers have given up the leadership of the Lombard Ghibellines, the best part of our inheritance. You and I will take the vacant place. To-morrow morning I will put on a gay dress like yours, and we will flee together to Ferrara. There Salinguerra will recognise us as his superiors, and help us serve our emperor. Tell me if I am wrong in believing that this cause and this destiny are yours.'

Sordello was dumb with joy, and she took flight before he could express his rapture at the knowledge of her love, and the prospect of becoming a king and embodying his own will in this aggregate of souls and bodies, as he had dreamed of doing.

So he and Palma reached Ferrara, and found this lady-city perishing under the violence with which her brutal lovers tried to tear her from each other. A young Guelf was moaning at the sight of a shrivelled hand nailed to the charred lintel of the doorway, within which he had seen his father stand, bidding him farewell. An old Ghibelline howled over a little skull with dazzling teeth, which he had dug up in the heap of rubbish where his house was burned. A

deserter from Salinguerra came back to find his palace razed so adroitly that he did not know the spot, but sat on the edge of a choked-up tank, ploughing the mud inside with his feet and singing the song with which the Ecelins rode into battle, until one fierce kick brought up his own mother's face, caught by the thick grey hair about his spur. Another Ghibelline had murdered his brother; a woman of Ferrara offered to sell her own daughters to Sordello; and he heard Salinguerra boast of burning hostages alive.

The sight of all this suffering led our hero up from dreaming of ruling men to aspiring to serve them. He confessed to Palma, as they talked that night alone beside a smouldering watch-fire, his unwillingness to join the Ghibellines. She urged that the Guelfs were just as cruel; but he longed to find some better way than that pursued by either faction. One of the sentinels came up and bade him sing of Rome. Sordello welcomed the conception of this city as the point of light from which rays traversed all the world. In her he saw embodied a plan to put mankind in full possession of their rights. Visions of her laws and her new structures crowded upon him, and he felt himself called to build up her authority. He knew how zealously the popes and bishops had taken the part of the Lombard cities and defended them from emperors and nobles. This cause seemed that

of the people against the princes, and of the future against the past.

He faltered as he remembered how slowly Rome was built the first generation satisfied with their caves, the second shaping their dreams into rafters and doorposts, but not solving the mystery of hinges, later ages bringing a goodly growth of brick and stone, and still later ones giving the world sewers, forums, amphitheatres, and aqueducts, until alabaster and obsidian became common, and statues of Jove and Venus rose above the baths. His courage returned, however, as he remembered how rapidly Hildebrand built up the papal power, and how mightily this great pontiff's successors laboured, joining strength with strength in the crusades, meeting pernicious strength with strength in the Lombard League, and almost dispensing with any need of strength in the Truce of God. At last he resolved to imitate these great workers, and begin by making a convert of Salinguerra.

Just before sunset he found the old warrior sitting with Palma in his own dreary palace. He had been giving audience to the Emperor's envoy, the Pope's legate, and the League's ambassadors, and was now complacently planning his next move, and considering what use he should make of the new badge of authority just sent him by his imperial master. Despite sixty years of fighting and scheming, he showed all the nonchalance of youth.

'So agile, quick

And graceful turned the head on the broad chest
Encased in pliant steel, his constant vest,

Whence split the sun off in a spray of fire
Across the room; and, loosened of its tire
Of steel, that head let breathe the comely brown
Large massive locks, discoloured as if a crown
Encircled them, so frayed the basnet where
A sharp white line divided clean the hair.
Square-faced,

No lion more; two vivid eyes, enchased

In hollows filled with many a shade and streak
Settling from the bold nose and bearded cheek.
Nor might the half-smile reach them that deformed
A lip supremely perfect else-unwarmed.' *

He

But thirty years of idle dreaming had left Sordello stunted, haggard, worn-out, and really old. stammered, and was so awkward and bashful, that his speech at first deserved only scoff. Salinguerra, who, careless of his words as he seemed to be, had never been found at a loss for the right one, listened with good-natured contempt to one whom he knew only as an archer's orphan son and Palma's too much favoured minstrel. Indeed, the Ghibelline veteran showed such scorn of the advice to release his prisoner, open his gates to the League, and turn Guelf himself, that Sordello was roused to eloquence. He pleaded the cause of the people, whose faces he saw filling the

* Ibid. p. 127, 11. 6, &c.

dim chamber, so powerfully that Salinguerra began to admire him and at last determined to make him his ally. Suddenly he flung the Emperor's badge around the orator's neck and welcomed him as Palma's husband, head of the Romano family, and leader of the Lombard Ghibellines.

And now, apparently without a single word being spoken, there sprang to light a secret which Palma had heard from her dying stepmother, namely, that Salinguerra's wife and child, who were supposed to have perished in that Vicenza massacre from which Elcorte saved Adelaide at the cost of his own life, had both been rescued. The mother died soon after and was buried secretly in the font at Goito, but the son was kept there in concealment and neglect, under the name of Sordello, as Elcorte's child by this crazy woman, who was jealous of Salinguerra's superiority to her own lord. Palma's knowledge of this treachery had encouraged her to attempt to restore his birthright to Sordello, whom we will still call by this familiar name.

His son

He sat pale and silent, but his father laughed with joy as he told how the Emperor was going to destroy the papal power and place all Lombardy under a prefect, whom he himself had leave to name. must take this office, and reign over not only Lombardy but Tuscany, in virtual independence of Frederic himself. So he ran on, until Palma drew