bastards and legitimates; that the former are called natural children because they are true children of nature. Neither does grace distinguish; and, as bastards are capable of temporal nobility, so also they are capable of spiritual, as witness St. Bridget of Ireland, and other natural children of signal grace and distinguished virtue. Further, he holds that the sons, of bastards who lose nobility by rebellion, are not infamous; and recover nobility on their father’s death; that infamy of any kind is washed-out by baptism: and that the Pope can free from subsequently contracted infamy by His dispensation. He distinguishes between bastards only legitimated by princes or the emperor, who are ineligible to ecclesiastical benefices; and bastards legitimated only by the Pope, who cannot succeed to the fiefs of other princes. He concludes that bastardy purges itself at the latest in the fourth generation. In the twentieth century, an inheritance devolves from the holder to “the heirs male of his body lawfully begotten”; in the fifteenth, the proviso “lawfully begotten” did not invariably obtain. A bastard, legitimated and recognised by his father, was as valid and capable as the son of a lawful marriage. The sin of the father and mother was a sin personal to them, and none the less a Sin: but it was not allowed to affect their innocent children. The Lord Pius P.P. II, on his way to the Congress of Mantua in 1459, was met on the frontier of Ferrara by eight bastards of the royal House of Este, including the delicious Borso, reigning duke, and two bastards of his highness’s bastard brother and predecessor Duke Leonello. These matters should be understood; for a large proportion of the personages in this history were of illegitimate birth, and under no disability of any kind thereby. * * * * *