kneeling to receive the benediction of the pope who stands in the foreground under his baldacchino, his robes held up behind by his acolytes, and his train of cardinals and bishops, in white mitres, stretching behind him, the last of them just issuing from a tall turreted gateway in the walls.” Some of the popes of this early period were men of violent and vindictive temper, such as Urban VI, who kept the dungeons full, and when he suspected his cardinals of treachery, put them on the rack to extort confession; or, like Sixtus II, whose chief pleasure was to see his soldiers fight out a challenge to the death; or like Innocent VIII, who was manifestly ill-named. The condition of Rome continued to be dreadful. There were daily turmoils; the soldiers entered the city by night and carried off with violence the most respectable maidens and young married women--taking the latter from their husbands; they poured in and attacked the castle of St. Angelo, plundered it, killed the garrison and abducted labourers employed upon it; again they went forth in battle array and returned with their prisoners taken in fight or seized on suspicion, and all alike were put to the torture. There is no crime with which the annals of the time do not abound. The record is one of perpetual violence, murder, rape and battle. “The whole city,” says Infessura, “is filled with villains ... and the homicides of which they are guilty are considered as nothing. On the Tor di Nona, close by the castle, bodies of persons are constantly found suspended, of whom nobody knows the names, or cares to know. Executions within the castle are of constant occurrence and they occasion neither surprise nor remark.... Every now and then an arm, a hand, a foot, a head, a leg, or some part of a corpse, is nailed up on the wall of the castle to mark the fact of an execution performed; but this is so common that nobody pays any attention to it, unless, indeed, it relate to a person of importance, or to some one engaged in a popular crime,--as was the case of Macrino di Castagno, who agreed with Bajazet to poison his brother Zemi in Rome, and, having been discovered, was executed, quartered and nailed outside the wall.” Any one who committed such an ordinary crime as murder, rape or parricide had only to pay and go free. One instance is related by Infessura, which he witnessed, of a man brought before the vice-chamberlain accused of having killed his two daughters and a servant, who was immediately set free by the vice-chamberlain on condition that he should pay a ransom.