There would be neither instruction nor amusement to be got from reading page after page filled with detailed accounts of the various occasions on which the chronic state of conspiracy against the Riarii burst out ever and anon into overt acts, during these years. Correspondence was well known to be actively kept up by the Ordelaffi with their friends within the city; and every now and then some butter woman, or friar, or countryman driving a pig into market, was caught with letters in his possession, and had to be hung. Then would occur attempts at insurrection, which occasioned fines and banishment, and beheading and hanging upon a larger scale. And the historians adverse to the Riarii assert that he hung and beheaded too much, and could expect no love from subjects thus treated; while the writers of opposite sympathies maintain, that he hung and beheaded so mildly and moderately, that the Forlìvesi were monsters of ingratitude not to love and honour so good a prince. Thus matters go on, perceptibly getting from bad to worse. Cash runs very low in the princely coffers, and the meat tax has to be re-imposed, occasioning a degree of discontent and disaffection altogether disproportioned to the gratitude obtained by its previous repeal. Unceasing vigilance has to be practised, stimulated by the princely but uncomfortable feeling, that every man approaching is as likely as not to be intent on murdering you. Girolamo and his Countess, one or other, or both, have to rush from Forlì to Imola, and from Imola to Forlì, at a moment's notice, for the prompt stamping out of some dangerous spark of tumult or insurrection. [Sidenote: A HARD LIFE.] In a word, this business of great family-founding on another man's foundations seems to have entailed a sufficiently hard life on those engaged in it. And though that "last infirmity of noble (?) minds," which prompts so much ignoble feeling, and engenders so many ignoble actions, vexing as it did their prince, vexed also the cultivators of the rich alluvial fields around Forlì by corn taxes, salt taxes, meat taxes, and other "redevances," yet on the whole it may be well supposed that "fallentis semita vitæ" at the plough tail had the best of it, despite occasional danger from the summary justice of the _Castellano_ of Ravaldino. That black care, which rode so inseparably and so hard behind the harassed prince backwards and forwards between Forlì and Imola, did more than keep the balance even between hempen jerkin and damasqued coat of mail; and the least enviable man in Forlì and its county was in all probability the founder of the greatness of the Riarii.