The procession took place on June 3rd: at its close the saint returned to his resting–place; and from that time forward the disease raged with redoubled fury, and the Milanese were reduced to despair. For eight days and nights, however, the shrine was deposited upon the high altar, surrounded by a concourse of votaries, beseeching help with tears and cries. The answer, our author says, was comprised in the number of the dying; and lest the interpretation should be doubtful, that number increased until 1800 perished daily. Strange infatuation! where every man should have avoided his dearest friend as charged with death, to congregate thousands in supplication against an enemy, to whom in that very act they gave a more extensive and deadly power! The speedy burial of the dead is commonly one of the great difficulties in time of pestilence. Here it was little felt. There was a class of men called Monatti, professed attendants on the plague, and ever ready for, and rejoicing in the most dangerous and disgusting services. Ripamonte speaks of them as a class well known to everybody, and passes in silence over the origin of the name, and the nature of the reward which tempted, or the tie, whether hereditary or other, which bound them to so desperate a service: curious points on which we have failed to procure information elsewhere. It was the duty of these men to convey the sick to the hospitals, and attend them there; to watch over those who remained at home, and to carry away the dead for interment. Strange and revolting were these funeral processions. They were preceded by two men with bells, who warned all persons to avoid the way, that the Monatti were at hand, death and pestilence in their train. Then came carts with the dead piled in disorder, many stripped even of their last covering, when it was such as to excite the cupidity of the ruffians in charge of them; while the long hair of women trailing on the ground, and limbs and heads dangling over the sides, and answering to the rough movements of the vehicle, and fallen bodies strewed along the ground,[122] presented a spectacle the more revolting for the grotesqueness that mingled with its horror. Meanwhile the Monatti sat carousing in the midst of death with indecent laughter and jests, and exultation in the general calamity; indulging the avowed hope that the mortality might never cease till the population of Milan was exterminated, and the wealth of her palaces left unowned and undefended, to be appropriated by the plunderer at will. Necessary as these ministers were, their presence added fresh miseries to those under which the city groaned. Reckless and desperate, hating others in proportion as they were loathed and despised, they were prepared for any crime that passion and interest might prompt. Their duty called them into all suspected houses, and at such a season every house lay open to suspicion. Every abode, every room therefore was exposed to