Cicero himself tells us that the friendship of Catiline had such fascinations that he had barely escaped its influence. It may be true that his pallid face, his fierce eyes and his nervous step, now quick, now slow, terrified the publicans and patricians of Rome; but none can believe that he butchered his own son, immolated victims to the silver eagle of Marius, or handed round in nocturnal conventicles a cup full of foaming blood. Catiline was a bad man because he was vanquished; but Salvator Rosa, the soldier and painter of Masaniello, when he drew Catiline as a stern and magnanimous man did not believe him a low plotter, and the great captain of our century declared that he preferred the part of the great Latin conspirator to that of the versatile Tully. The character of the Count of Lavagna has been depicted in similar colours by servile writers skilful in inventing calumnies. Catiline and Fieschi had the same ambition and a common aim. The former, in his familiar letters to Lentulus which were published in the Senate, declared that no venal ambition led him to make war. He said that his estates were security for his debts and that the liberality and wealth of Orestilla and his daughter would provide for any deficiency. He averred, he was impelled by wrongs and slanders, that he made the cause of the unfortunate his own, because he was defrauded of the fruit of his labours, and, while he was falsely suspected, was forced to see base men taking his place. The same is true of Fieschi, whose death, Gianettino Doria had sworn. In Genoa, not less than in Rome, a partisan contest between the nobles and the people had lasted for centuries. Here, after the civil conflagrations, as after the scourgings of Rome by Marius and Sylla, liberty gradually expired. In both Republics, the people were bowed down by the insolence of the great. They were deprived of all share in the government, and corrupt ambition had unbounded sway. In Liguria, Andrea Doria had completed the triumph of the party of the nobles and imperialists and the ruin of popular liberty. Though he forbore to assume a princely title, he was a true king in authority, his nephew aspired to regal honours, and every popular right was trampled down by the Spanish power. According to Bonfadio this subjection was too bitter for the great soul of the Count Lavagna long to endure the humiliation. But his enemies wrote, and by a thousand channels circulated, the most incredible things as parts of his designs:--That he attempted by base intrigues to ruin the Republic, that he aimed to seduce it to servitude to his family or to France, to exterminate the Doria family, to lay bloody and felonious hands on the bank of St. George, to put the city to fire and sack. The decrees and official reports of the Republic do not warrant such statements, and a theory more honourable to him is justified by the gentleness of his character, by the Guelph traditions