He did not go to England. He remained in Tuscany; for the strange language of a foreign country would have deepened his affliction. Among the monks in the beautiful, solitary cloister of Vallombrosa, he sank again into fervent prayer and severe penance; and no one who saw this monk lying in prayer upon his knees, could have recognised in him the hero of patriot struggles, and the soldier terrible in fight. After twenty years of cloister-life in Tuscany, Clemens returned shortly before his brother to Corsica. Once more his heart glowed with the hope of freedom for his country; but events soon taught the grayhaired hero that Corsica was lost for ever. In sorrow and penance he died in December of the same year in which his brother was summoned before the Convention, to answer the charge of high treason. In Clemens, patriotism had become a cultus and a religion. A great and holy passion, stirred to an intense glow, is in itself religious; when it takes possession of a people, more especially when it does so in periods of calamity and severe pressure, it expresses itself as religious worship. The priests in those days preached battle from every pulpit, the monks marched with the ranks into the fight, and the crucifixes served instead of standards. The parliaments were generally held in convents, as if God himself were to preside over them, and once, as we saw in their history, the Corsicans by a decree of their Assembly placed the country under the protection of the Holy Virgin. Pasquale, too, was religious. I saw in his house the little dark room which he had made into a chapel; it had been allowed to remain unchanged. He there prayed daily to God. But Clemens lay for six or seven hours each day in prayer. He prayed even in the thick of battle--a figure terrible to look on, with his beads in one hand and his musket in the other, clad like the meanest Corsican, and not to be recognised save by his great fiery eyes and bushy eyebrows. It is said of him that he could load his piece with furious rapidity, and that, always sure of his aim, he first prayed for mercy to the soul of the man he was about to shoot, then crying: "Poor mother!" he sacrificed his foe to the God of freedom. When the battle was over, he was gentle and mild, but always grave and profoundly melancholy. A frequent saying of his was: "My blood and my life are my country's; my soul and my thoughts are my God's." Men of Pasquale's type are to be sought among the Greeks; but the types of Clemens among the Maccabees. He was not one of Plutarch's heroes; he was a hero of the Old Testament. CHAPTER XI. THE OLD HERMIT.