caparisoned than the one before; and last of all twelve fat oxen. Galeazzo and the bridegroom sat at one table with the noblest of the guests, among whom was Messer Francesco Petrarca the poet, in the most honourable place. At another were placed Regina della Scala and a number of ladies. Such scenes as these are dimly pictured for us in primitive frescoes here and there, in which we see assemblages of ladies in jewelled robes and lofty peaked head-dresses, and gentlemen correspondingly fine stiffly seated at narrow boards, or pacing with slow and stately step through the dance within some spacious pillared hall. Though extravagantly lavish for State purposes, the Visconti did not keep open Court like their predecessors. No tables were set out in the streets for the common people on holidays, no oxen roasted whole or wine-vats broached for all who liked to drink. The chroniclers complain of the avarice of their Lords. The taxes were continually increased. Pressed by the huge cost of their wars and their alliances, the Visconti were in fact always in need of money, and so assured was their supremacy in Milan, that they no longer feared the discontent of the citizens. With the development of their despotism the social gulf between the Visconti and the rest of the community had grown wide. Both brothers were proud, suspicious and cruel. But the severity of the silent Bernabò, and his terrible fits of rage and strange capricious temper, made him the most feared. He was laudably resolved to maintain justice and order, so that a man might go unarmed through any part of his dominions, and to suppress the old faction hatreds, but his methods were intolerably harsh. No one was allowed to call himself Guelf or Ghibelline on pain of having his tongue cut out. To be found abroad in the city at night, for any reason whatever, was to lose a foot, and so forth. Moreover, on mere suspicion people were put to cruel death or torment. This arbitrary severity was, however, of little avail, and crime was far more rife in the city than before Bernabò’s time. The tyrant’s passion for dogs was as extravagant as his disregard for human suffering. He had five thousand hounds, which his subjects were compelled to keep and tend for him, and if one were found to be either too fat or too lean for the chase, or to have come to any harm, woe to its guardian. Every sort of game was sacred to the prince’s sport, and the peasants who slew wild boars or other forest creatures for food during a severe famine, were hanged or blinded. Two Franciscan brothers, who dared to expostulate with the prince for his harshness, were burnt as heretics, an act something ironical on the part of one who himself spent nearly all his life under the ban of the Church. There was a certain grim humour in some of Bernabò’s fierce deeds, as in his treatment of two dignified Benedictine abbots, who were sent to treat with him by the Pope. The prince met them on a bridge over the Lambro,