have induced to look kindly upon their conquerors. He is painfully anxious to make out a good case for those he calls his "brothers," (very old brothers by this time,) but succeeds so little to his satisfaction, that he is fain to throw himself on the mercy of his readers, by asking the rather illogical question, whether the crime of a few individuals is to be imputed to a nation, or _even to a part of a nation_? Then he enumerates some of the grievances which brought on the massacre known as the Vespers. "It is certain," he says, "that Charles of Anjou, not by himself, but by military chiefs, to whom he abandoned himself without reserve, abused of the means necessary to retain in subjection a people hostile to his cause, and whom that very excess of oppression might drive to shake off an iron yoke. He abused of the feudal prerogative which gave him right of controlling the marriages of the vassals of the crown, by compelling rich heiresses to marry his Provençal adherents, or by retaining in forced celibacy noble damsels whose inheritance the royal exchequer coveted." This is pretty well for a beginning, and enough to stir the bile of a more patient race than the Sicilians, even in an age when such acts of feudal tyranny were less startling and odious than they now would seem. But this is merely the first item. Charles also abused of an old law that existed both in Sicily and Spain, and which has been but recently abolished in the latter country. The law of the _mesta_ gave the sheep of the royal domain right of range of all the pastures in the country, no matter who the proprietors. With this vexatious privilege Charles combined exorbitant monopolies. He compelled the rich landholders to take on lease his horses, flocks, cattle, bees, and fruit-trees, and to account to him for them every year at a fixed rate, even when disease decimated the animals, and the sirocco had withered and uprooted the trees and plants. And nothing was less rare, M. de St Priest acknowledges, than the personal ill-treatment of those who delayed to pay the impost, often twice levied upon the same persons, under pretence of chastising their unwillingness. Imprisonment, confiscation, and the bastinado, punished their indigence. The nefarious tricks played with the currency completed the measure of misery poured out upon the unhappy Sicilians. Like Alphonso X. of Castile, and most of the potentates of the period, Charles coined pieces of money with much alloy, which he named, after himself, _Carlini d'oro_, and exchanged them by force against the augustales, an imperial coinage of the purest gold. The public voice was loud against such tyranny and abuse, but it reached not the arrogant ears of the Beaumonts, the Morhiers, and other haughty Frenchmen who successively governed Sicily. The Bishop of Patti and brother John of Messina, complained to the Pope in presence of Charles himself. The king heard them in silence, but, after the pontifical audience, he had