When the most pleasant and reasonable of Popes was Legate at Bologna, a circumstance connected with swords came under his observation. Two senators had fallen into a deadly quarrel touching the pre-eminence of Tasso and Ariosto. A duel ensued, in which the champion of Ariosto was mortally wounded. The future Pope visited the dying man, whose sole observation to his visitor’s religious injunctions was—“What an ass I am, to get run through the body in the very flower of my age, for the sake of Ariosto, of whom I have never read a line.” “But—” interrupted the priest. “And if,” exclaimed the dying man, not heeding the interruption, “if I _had_ read him, I should not have understood him; for I am but a fool at the best of times.” Benedict himself had a respect for swordsmen; and it was said of him and that other pleasant fellow, his contemporary, the Sultan Mahmoud, that if they were made to change places, the Holy Father becoming Grand Seigneur, and the Sultan becoming Pope, nobody would be sensible of any consequent difference; except, perhaps, the most intimate portion of the Sultan’s household. Benedict was, at all events, wiser than that celebrated Capuchin, who, preaching repentance to a party about to resort to the arbitration of the sword, exclaimed, “Brethren, admire and bless Divine Providence, who has placed death at the close of life, in order that we might have the more time to be prepared for it.” This confusion of ideas reminds me of that which existed in the mind of the soldier who remarked, that people nowadays did not live to such a lengthened age as when he was young. “Not that there are not old people now,” said he, “but then _they_ were born a very long time ago!” Finally, let me conclude the subject of swords with something better worth remembering than mere gossip. Toledo, Damascus, and Milan have been especially renowned for the excellence of the swords manufactured in those respective places. The quality of the Spanish blade is said to have been given it by the cunning of Arab workmen; but the fact is, that Spanish blades were famous for their power of letting daylight into the soul’s tabernacle as early as the old Roman time. When the first Cæsar was master of the empire, Iberian tailors (and ladies) worked only with Toledo needles; while Iberian officers and gentlemen (for the characters were distinct in those heathen times: as for the matter of that, they sometimes are now) fought only with Toledo blades. Virgil alludes to the excellence of the Spanish steel in his first Georgic: “At Chalybes nudi ferrum (mittunt).” Justin says the Chalybes were Spaniards; and the _nudi_, no doubt, refers to the fashion in which they worked at the forge. Dryden translates the line—“And naked Spaniards temper steel for war.” Further, Diodorus Siculus states, “that the Celtiberians so tempered their steel, that no helmet could resist the stroke of the sword.”