The clean cheerful town on the sheer limestone crags boasts a cathedral, wherein, so the guide-book informs us, we shall find the tomb of Filangieri, the great Italian jurist. But the building contains in reality far more stirring associations than those connected with a prominent lawyer. It is but a rococo structure of the usual Italian type, and its painted series of portraits of past bishops is by no means an uncommon complement of cathedral churches in the South. But here, amidst the long rows of indifferent portraits, we note an omission, a space that is occupied, not by a likeness but by a medallion, which represents a cherub with the forefinger of his right hand laid as a seal of silence upon the lips. Here-by indeed hangs a tale, obscure perhaps, but pathetic and human to the last degree. We all remember the broad frieze filled with Doges’ faces which is carried round the great hall of the ducal palace in Venice, wherein the place assigned to the traitor, Marino Faliero, contains a black veil instead of the usual portrait. Here in little Vico Equense is to be found a somewhat similar incident, but with this important difference:—the bishop whose portrait is here omitted was the most worthy of remembrance of all his peers. The crime of Monsignore Michele Natale, Bishop of Vico Equense, to which the silent cherub bears everlasting witness, was that of being a patriot and a Liberal (in the truest sense of that term) during the anxious times of the ill-fated Parthenopean Republic, that short-lived period of aristocratic government which was set up in self-defence by certain Neapolitan nobles, prelates and men of science after the abrupt departure of their cowardly King and Queen to Palermo. We all remember the terrible ending of that government: how the vile rabble-army of Cardinal Ruffo assaulted Naples; how the city capitulated to the Cardinal on the express condition that all life and property should be spared; and how Lord Nelson, refusing to recognise the terms that Ruffo himself had agreed to, and overruling the Cardinal’s protests, treated the unhappy prisoners. The Bishop of Vico Equense was one of this band of martyrs, for he suffered death under circumstances of exceptional brutality on the morning of August 20th 1799, in the piazza in front of the church of the Carmine, together with two Neapolitans of noble rank, Giuliano Colonna and Gennaro Serra, and with the poetess, Eleonora Pimentel, a Portuguese by birth but the widow of a Neapolitan officer. All went nobly to their doom amidst the execrations of the demoralised bloodthirsty mob of _lazzaroni_, yelling at and insulting the “Jacobins,” and kept back with no little difficulty by the royal troops from mutilating the corpses of women, bishops and princes. Monsignore Natale himself was hanged, and in his case the public executioner—“Masto Donato” as he was nick-named by the populace—gave vent to many pleasantries concerning the episcopal rank of his victim.