hands crossed on the breast which had been tattoed with a cross when He was a boy, and His ankles crossed like a crusader, rigid, as He wished to lie in His coffin,--and His brain active, active, counting physical pulsations, meditating on the future, scheming, planning, counting each breath, and waiting for the last--and death. Sometimes He wondered whether it was all worth while: whether it was in accordance with God's Will that He should be so will-full. He decided to risk an affirmative to that, on the ground of the existence of His will. He knew that He tried rightly to use it. He hoped for mercy on account of lapses. One point He determined. With all due respect to Sokrates and Seneca, Death came by Sin, and Sin was God's enemy, and God's friends must fight God's enemies to the bitter end. To relax was suicide, and suicide was sin; and, tired with conflict as He was, eager for rest and peace as He was, it certainly was not worth while to add to His tale of sin: it was not worth while to exchange tiresome earth for untiring hell: to lose, what Petrarch calls 'the splendour of the angelic smile.' He had no steel in His possession except safety-razors: knives and scissors He had abolished long ago; and now He had light strong gratings fixed to all His windows. He would not go into temptation. 'I am fawned upon by hope. Ah, would that she had a voice which I could understand, a voice like that of a herald, that I might not be agitated by distracting thought,' He said to Himself in the words of Elektra at the tomb of Agamemnōn. Had He been trained in boyhood at a public-school, in adolescence at an university, had His lines been cast in service, He would not have had to put so severe restraint upon Himself. The occasion would not have arisen. A simple and perhaps a stolid character would have been formed of His temper, potent and brilliant enough to distinguish Him from the mob, but incapable of hypersensation. Instead, His frightfully self-concentrated and lonely life, denied the ordinary opportunities of action, had developed this heart-rending complexity: had trained him in mental gymnastics to a degree of excellence which was inhuman, abominable, (in the first intention of the words), in its facile flexible solert dexterity. He was not restrained by any sense whatever of modesty or of decorum. He had no sense of those things. He knew it; and regretted it. He was Himself. He distrusted that self, rejoiced in it, and determined to deal well and righteously with it. Dr Guido Cabelli, at length summoned, found Him positively furious with the pain of physical and intellectual struggles. The physician exhibited Pot. Brom., Tinct. Valerian. Am., Tinct. Zinzil., Sp. Chlorof., Aq. Menth. Pip., once every three hours. It made the Pontiff conscious that He stank like a male cat in early summer: but He heard no more boom-booming in his ears. It strung-up His nervous system for the time. He put on His