called sanitation was unknown, great and incessant efforts in the way of cleanliness were imperative; and he who insistently displayed, who publicly exhibited, his cleanly habits, naturally enjoyed the consideration and approval of his equally modish contemporaries. And they were practically pious too, these hardy ardent exquisites, who shed an enemy’s blood as remorselessly as though murder were a natural function. They would weep real tears of devotion over the drama of the Passion of our Divine Redeemer enacted in the ruined Colosseo of Rome; and, afterwards, zealously adjourn with knives to the houses of known Jews, or perfervidly hunt the dark lanes of the city for any of the accursed race who was so misguided as to show his yellowpatched jerkin on the street. The Venetians had a penchant for holy relics, and deemed no sacrifice too great for increasing their collection. In 1455, the republic made a bid of ten thousand ducats for the Seamless Coat, now at Treves, and ordained days of humiliation when the offer was refused. The Doge of Venice was obliged officially to assist at twelve public processions in each year. To please the piety and vanity of Florence, Lorenzo de’ Medici personally applied to the city of Spoleto for the corpse of the painter Fra Lippo Lippi; but Spoleto answered that it had none too many ornaments as a city, especially in the shape of the cadavers of distinguished people, and begged to be excused. “The men of the Renascence were so constituted that, to turn, from vice and cruelty and crime, from the deliberate corruption and enslavement of a people by licentious pleasures, from the persecution of an enemy in secret, with a fervid and impassioned movement of the soul to God, was nowise impossible. Their temper admitted of this anomaly, as we may plainly see from Cellini’s autobiography.” (_Symonds’ Renascence._) * * * * *