Turning to the History of Rome, it will be of interest to take a glance at the pious Confraternity _della Morte_ which was instituted in 1551, and regularly established in 1560, by His Holiness, Pius IV. It was chiefly composed of citizens of high rank. Its object was to provide burial for the dead. Solemnly broke upon the balmy stillness of the Roman nights, all these years and centuries since its foundation, its chanting of holy psalmody, and its audible praying for the dead, borne along in its religious keeping. The glare of the waxen torches fell upon the bier, the voices of the associates joined in the _Miserere,_ and the Church reached, the corpse was laid there, till the fitting hour, when the Requiem Mass should be sung, and the final absolution given, preparatory to interment. Florence supplies us with a brilliant picture of that sixth day of July, 1439, the feast of Saint Romolo the Martyr, in the ninth year of the Pontificate of Pope Eugenius IV., when long-standing differences between the Greek and Latin Churches were brought to an end in a most amicable manner. Alas! for the Greeks, that they did not accept the decisions of that day as final. On the 22d of January, 1439, Cosmo de Medici, then Gonfaloniere of Florence, received the Pope and his cardinals, with a pomp and splendor unknown to the history of modern Europe. On the 12th of the following month came the Patriarch, Joseph of Constantinople, and his bishops and theologians. On the 15th arrived the Greek Emperor, John Paleologus, who was received at the Porto San Gallo by the Pope and all his cardinals, the Florentine Signory, and a long procession of the members of the monastic orders. "A rare and very remarkable assemblage," says a chronicler [1] "of the most learned men of Europe, and, indeed, of those extra European seats of a past culture, which were even now giving forth the last flashes from a once brilliant light on the point of being quenched in utter darkness, were thus assembled at Florence." [Footnote 1: T. A. Trollope, in "History of the Commonwealth of Florence," Vol. III., pp. 137-8.] This was the inauguration of the far-famed Council of Florence, which had the result of settling the points at issue between the Eastern and Western Churches. "The Greeks confessed that the Roman faith proceeded rightly (_prociedere bene_), and united themselves with it by the grace of God." Proclamation was accordingly made in the Cathedral, then called Santa Reparata, that the Greeks had agreed to hold and to believe the five disputed articles of which the fifth was, "That he who dies in sin for which penance has been done, but from which he has not been purged, goes to Purgatory, and that the divine offices, Masses, prayers, and alms are useful for the purging of him."