al life.

Chapter XXIV.

Alvira's Confession.

Tremble, thou wretch,
Though hast within thee undivulged crimes,
Unwhipped of justice: hide thee, thou bloody hand;
Thou perjured, and thou simular man of virtue,
Thou art incestuous: caitiff, to pieces shake,
That under covert and convenient seeming
Hast practised on man's life: close pent-up guilts,
Rive your concealing continents, and cry
These dreadful summoners grace.
-- Lear.

It was a beautiful morning in the Lent of 1678. The sun had risen
over the Apennines, and flung its magnificence over the Bay of Naples.
The smoke of Vesuvius cast its shadow like a monstrous pine over the
vineyards and villas that adorned the mountain-side to the sea-shore.
The morning was such as Byron gazed on in fancy through the sorrowful
eyes of the eloquent heroine of one of his tragedies:

"So bright, so rolling back the clouds into
Vapors more lovely than the unclouded sky,
With golden pinnacles and snowy mountains,
And billows purpler than the ocean's, making
In heaven a glorious mockery of the earth,
So like we almost deem it permanent,
So fleeting we can scarcely call it aught
Beyond a vision, 'tis so transiently
Scattered along the eternal vault!"

Whilst the eight hour was chiming from the tower of the old Gesu there
issued from the monastery attacked to the church a priest accompanied
by an acolyte bearing a large, plain cross and ringing a small bell.
They moved in the direction of the mole or old fortress of the city.
Soon a crowd followed--some bare-headed; others, especially the females,
told their beads in silence.

The traveller in Italy is aware of the pious custom practised by some
of the religious communities of preaching in the open air to the people
during the season of Lent. Extraordinary things are related of these
harangues. The lives of the sainted missionaries ring with tales of
the marvellous and miraculous powers given to God's servants when, in
moments of fire and zeal, they went from their cloisters like beings
of another world to awaken sinners to a sense of future terrors. At
one time we read of the saint's voice carried miraculously to a distance
of several miles; the peasant working in the fields would hear the
sweet sounds without seeing the speaker. At another the funeral
procession was arrested and the dead called from t