on horseback. There they came very slowly jolting over the cultivated ground, those three heavy bullock carts, with their primitive wheels of one solid circular piece of wood, and their huge cream-coloured oxen with enormous horned heads gaily decorated, as Leopold Robert shows them to us, and the brilliant tinted dresses of the laughing bevy drawn by them, glancing gaudily in the sunlight among the soberer colouring of the vineyards in their summer pride of green. Then Don Raymond and Pescara advanced to the carts, and handed from them the Marchioness and Donna Laura, who mounted on handsomely equipped jennets prepared for them. It does not appear that this attention was extended to any of the other ladies, who must therefore be supposed to have remained sitting in the carts, while the Marchioness and the favoured Donna Laura rode through the ranks "con multa festa et gloria." And when she had seen all, with much pleasure and admiration, on a given signal three mules loaded with sweetmeats were led forward, with which the gay Marchioness "regaled all the captains." Then all the company with much content,—excepting, it is to be feared, the soldiers, who had to stand at arms under the July sun, while their officers were eating sugar-plums, and Don Raymond and Donna Laura were saying and swallowing sweet things,—took leave of each other, the army pursuing its march towards Verona, and the Marchioness and her ladies returning in their carts to Mantua.[172] [Sidenote: A REVIEW.] The other scattered notices of Pescara's doings during his campaign are of a less festive character. They show him to have been a hard and cruel man, reckless of human suffering, and eminent even among his fellow captains for the ferocity, and often wantonness of the ravages and wide-spread misery he wrought. On more than one occasion, Passeri winds up his narrative of some destruction of a town, or desolation of a fertile and cultivated district, by the remark, that the cruelty committed was worse than Turks would have been guilty of. Yet this same Passeri, an artisan, belonging to a class which had all to suffer and nothing to gain from such atrocities, writes, when chronicling this same Pescara's[173] death, that "on that day died, I would have you know, gentle readers, the most glorious and honoured captain that the world has seen for the last hundred years." It is curious to observe how wholly the popular mind was enslaved to the prejudices and conventional absurdities of the ruling classes; how entirely the feelings of the masses were in unison with those of the caste which oppressed them; how little reason they conceived they had to complain under the most intolerable treatment, and how little hope of progressive amelioration there was from the action of native-bred public opinion.