We have no need, therefore, of any of that feeling of the moral pulse, which might be useful for the priest or philosopher, who would "minister to a mind diseased." We have only to ascertain that a certain amount of deviation from moral health existed under such and such circumstances. And this, in as much as the laws which govern our ethical constitution are as immutable as those which rule the physical world, is an investigation of infinite and eternal interest. Under the influence of such and such social constitutions, spiritual teachings, and modes of living, this case of moral disease was generated. Here is a practically useful fact. And if it should appear that, under those same influences this malady was epidemic, the interest of the case assumes larger proportions. Altogether dismissing from our minds, therefore, all considerations of our poor defunct subject's blameableness, and deservings, and all weighing of allowances wholly imponderable in any scales of ours, let us heedfully observe and reflect on the proved facts of the case. This poor Catherine, born, as our autopsy shows, with so strong, vigorous, and large a nature, came to be savagely reckless of human life, and blood-thirsty in her vengeance; came to be so grossly material in her mode of regarding that part of our nature, which, duly spiritualised, contributes much to our preparation for eternity, but which, unspiritualised, most draws us to the level of the lower animals, as to be capable of _writing_ such things as have been alluded to; came lastly to consider all distinction between right and wrong, and God's eternal laws to be of the nature of an Act of Parliament carelessly drawn, through which, by sharp-witted dexterity, coaches-and-four, as the saying goes, might be driven with impunity; came, we say, to be all this as the result of the teaching offered her by all around her in that great fifteenth century, of the spiritual guidance afforded her by those "ages of faith," and living heart-felt religion, and of the social ideas produced by the medieval relationship between the governors of mankind and their subjects. Catherine continued to reside with the Murate nuns till the time of her death, in the year 1509, the forty-seventh of her age. She made a long and accurately drawn will, characterised by the justice and good sense with which she partitioned what belonged to her among the children of her three marriages; and was buried in the chapel of the convent; where her monument was still visible, although, strangely enough, its inscribed altar tombstone had at some period been turned face downwards, and where her remains reposed till they were (literally) dispersed a few years ago, on occasion of the old Murate convent being converted into a state prison. VITTORIA COLONNA. (1490–1547.) CHAPTER I.