he
dungeons of the Inquisition. The Inquisitors sat on their tribunals;
black-robed familiars flitted about, or waited attentive upon their orders;
one expert in ecclesiastical jurisprudence proved the edge of an axe, and
another heated pincers in a chafing-dish; dismal groans pierced the massy
walls; two sturdy fellows, stripped to the waist, adjusted the rollers of a
rack. A surgeon approached the bedside, bearing a phial and a lancet. The
youth screamed and again became insensible.

But his affright was groundless. The Inquisitors had already taken
cognisance of Abano's scrolls, and found that, touching these at least, he
had spoken sooth. Besides kings, princes, ministers, magistrates, and other
secular persons who had owed their success in life to dealings with the
devil under his mediation, the infernal bondsmen included so many pillars
of the Church and champions of the Faith; prelates plenty, abbots in
abundance, cardinals not a few, a (some whispered _the_) Pope; above all,
so many of the Inquisitors themselves, that further inquiry could evidently
nowise conduce to edification. The surgeon, therefore, infused an opiate
into the veins of the unconscious youth, and he came to himself upon a
galley speeding him to the holy war in Cyprus, where he fell fighting the
Turk.

ALEXANDER THE RATCATCHER

"Alexander Octavus mures, qui Urbem supra modum vexabant, anathemate
perculit."[--_Palatius. Fasti Cardinalium_, tom. v.p. 46.]

I

"Rome and her rats are at the point of battle!"

This metaphor of Menenius Agrippa's became, history records, matter of fact
in 1689, when rats pervaded the Eternal City from garret to cellar, and
Pope Alexander the Eighth seriously apprehended the fate of Bishop Hatto.
The situation worried him sorely; he had but lately attained the tiara at
an advanced age--the twenty-fourth hour, as he himself remarked in
extenuation of his haste to enrich his nephews. The time vouchsafed for
worthier deeds was brief, and he dreaded descending to posterity as the Rat
Pope. Witty and genial, his sense of humour teased him with a full
perception of the absurdity of his position. Peter and Pasquin concurred in
forbidding him to desert his post; and he derived but small comfort from
the ingenuity of his flatterers, who compared him to St. Paul contending
with beasts at Ephesus.

It wanted three half-hours to midnight, as Alexander sat amid traps and
ratsbane in his chamber in the Vatica