There is no crime, however foul, for which gold will not procure a pardon, both from church and state, in Italy; but Count Giulio was a beggar, without even one quattrino. Those who now possessed his villas and castles—having either purchased them in the days of his mad extravagance, or holding them from Mocenigo on his forfeiture—were loudest in his condemnation; although his hands were yet unstained by blood, and he had been the dupe of a beautiful but vicious woman and the unwitting tool of a desperate debauchee. In the solitude of the horrible piombi, he had ample time to reflect on the insanity of his career, and to repent: he wept for Diomida, and beat his head against his dungeon walls in the extremity of his agony. He endured all the pangs of remorse and self-reproach; and looking back to that proud eminence on which he had so lately stood, admired, honoured and beloved,—a position to which the talents of his high-born ancestors had raised him, and his then virtues entitled him,—Diomida, the gentle, the suffering, and beautiful, arose vividly before him, gashed by the dagger of Strazoldi. Then his reason tottered, and he longed for death to relieve him of his misery. The new Doge Alviso Mocenigo, remembering an old grudge he bore Count Giulio, shewed now, in the plenitude of his power, the true Venetian spirit of revenge: he cast him into one of those dreadful cells under the roof of the palace of St. Mark—the worst of the piombi or leaden dungeons—where the wretched prisoners, stripped to the skin, are chained to the pavement, and exposed to the burning rays of a hot Italian sun concentrated in a focus, until their brains boil and they become raving maniacs. During the heat of a scorching summer, the unhappy della Torre experienced these frightful torments in their utmost extreme, till he found relief in furious madness. The stern Doge Alviso, insatiate in his thirst for revenge, consigned his fallen foe to the galleys of the Maltese knights, where the flaying rod of the task-master restored him to his senses and the pangs of reflection and remorse. Recollection slowly returned, and the once noble Giulio della Torre, who had been chained to the oar a crazed maniac, became in time a hardened villain, lost to everything but a craving for vengeance on Mocenigo; which, happily, was never gratified. The bandits, bravoes, and other murderous villains, with whom he was compelled to associate, applauded, pitied, and encouraged him by turns: or affected to do so; but the meanest citizen of Venice would not have glanced at him on the highway. Mocenigo died; and for ten long years Giulio tugged at the oar: but the thirst for revenge never passed away. The galley was wrecked on the rocks of Alfieri on the Calabrian coast; he escaped, and turned robber. From a robber he became a hermit, secluded in the wild woods, and dwelt in the habitation which you now behold.