Catherine, however, considered the news of Borgia's elevation to be most important to her interests, and highly satisfactory. Two envoys on behalf of Forlì, and two on behalf of Imola, were despatched to Rome to compliment the new Pope on his election, and offer the homage of the Countess and her son. Being very well received by his Holiness, they begged that he would grant that a Jubilee, with plenary absolution, might be held for three successive years in two churches of the Franciscans in Forlì, which was graciously accorded, with the condition however that a fresh bull should be applied for each year; which was only laying a small tax on the profits of the Jubilee. Such a grant was not uncommon. But the result of the three years' speculation, as recorded by the Forlì historians, is curious. The first year brought 2500 lire, with which the monks of one church built a cloister, and the nuns of the other put a new roof to their chapel, and newly fitted out a miraculous Virgin. The second year's produce was almost nothing, because the brief enabling the convents to absolve from homicide did not arrive in time. And the third year, they got only 184 lire, because the Apostolic Court, having then more important matters in hand, again neglected to send the necessary brief in due time. Up to this period the life of Catherine has been passed altogether in that good time,—those halcyon days for Italy described by Guicciardini in the opening of his great work, and marked by him as coming to an end in the fatal year, 1494. To readers more conversant with the regular well-ordered course of life in the nineteenth century than with that of the fifteenth, it may seem, that the little magic-lanthorn-like peeps at the men and things of that old time, offered to them in the foregoing pages, can hardly be deemed samples of that happy condition so regretfully commemorated by the great historian. Murders of princes, and awards of torture and death to their conspiring subjects, recurring in oscillations of pendulum-like regularity,—civil war in the streets of Rome, and monstrous corruption in her palaces,—lawless violence of the law-making classes, met by continually successful evasion of the law by those for whose oppression rather than protection it was intended: all this does not represent to our ideas a happy state of society. But Guicciardini looks back to these days from amid the misfortunes of a far more disastrous period. The good old days,—when Italian throats were throttled only by Italian hands; when the tyrants were Italian tyrants not too strong to be occasionally knocked on the head by Italian rebels; when the wealth extorted from the people by splendid princes was at least scattered among them again by their splendour; when, in a word, Italy, manage it as they might, was for the Italians,—were sighed for as a golden age in that iron period, when the barbarian from beyond the Alps had come down upon them. [Sidenote: AN UNPLEASANT POSITION.]