But Peter, the prefect of Rome, and commandant of the Castle of St. Angelo, a devoted servant of the pope, into whose custody Arnold was delivered, fearful lest his prisoner should escape by means of a popular riot,--as he had once done before in the same circumstances,--resolved to execute him on his own account; and, without waiting forfurther instructions either from Frederic or Adrian, but secretly abetted by several cardinals on the spot, had the unhappy man led out early on the morning of the 18th of June, 1155, before the popular or people's gate; where he was fastened to a cross projecting from the midst of a pile of faggots, which, being fired, soon enveloped their victim in the flames. His cries and the tumult of the execution roused the citizens, dwelling hard by, from their beds, who presently ran up lamenting and furious to the rescue; but, in vain; as they were thrust back on all sides by the soldiers who kept the ground. Nevertheless, such was the infatuated reverence which the people manifested for their late tribune, that it was found expedient after his execution to throw his ashes into the Tiber, to prevent them being enshrined as holy relics. Arnold of Brescia was about fifty years old, when he thus met his fate. However shocking such cruel executions as he suffered may be to the more enlightened benevolence, or more sensual refinement of the present day; yet, from the point of view of the middle ages,--that the visible punishment of a crime should be commensurate with, and, as it were, symbolise its moral enormity,--there can be no doubt but that in the present case the criminal received only what he deserved. Few men ever did worse mischief to society in their day, than Arnold of Brescia. Private ambition was his ruling passion, and his hopes of gratifying it were set on the realization of dreams and fancies, engendered of an unbridled imagination, which an admixture of mysticism further distempered. A false scandal which he took at the discrepancy between the lives and doctrines of the clergy, in his time widely corrupted, heightened by his Pharisaical pride,--which a bodily temperament, naturally disinclined to sensual excess, inflated all the more--as, by means of such bodily temperament, he was enabled with so little merit of his own, to keep up an exterior severity of demeanour closely resembling a holy asceticism,--led him at last to confound the abuse of religion with religion itself; and, under the further influence of his insatiable thirst for notoriety, to broach schismatical views, and then a plan of ecclesiastical as well as political reform for the world, of which, he persuaded himself, he was marked out to be the apostle.