en deities and demigods appeared
familiarly on earth, mingling with its inhabitants as friend with
friend,--when nymphs, satyrs, and the whole train of classic faith or
fable hardly took pains to hide themselves in the primeval woods,--at
that auspicious period the lineage of Monte Beni had its rise. Its
progenitor was a being not altogether human, yet partaking so largely of
the gentlest human qualities, as to be neither awful nor shocking to
the imagination. A sylvan creature, native among the woods, had loved
a mortal maiden, and--perhaps by kindness, and the subtile courtesies
which love might teach to his simplicity, or possibly by a ruder
wooing--had won her to his haunts. In due time he gained her womanly
affection; and, making their bridal bower, for aught we know, in the
hollow of a great tree, the pair spent a happy wedded life in that
ancient neighborhood where now stood Donatello's tower.

From this union sprang a vigorous progeny that took its place
unquestioned among human families. In that age, however, and long
afterwards, it showed the ineffaceable lineaments of its wild paternity:
it was a pleasant and kindly race of men, but capable of savage
fierceness, and never quite restrainable within the trammels of social
law. They were strong, active, genial, cheerful as the sunshine,
passionate as the tornado. Their lives were rendered blissful by art
unsought harmony with nature.

But, as centuries passed away, the Faun's wild blood had necessarily
been attempered with constant intermixtures from the more ordinary
streams of human life. It lost many of its original qualities, and
served for the most part only to bestow an unconquerable vigor, which
kept the family from extinction, and enabled them to make their own part
good throughout the perils and rude emergencies of their interminable
descent. In the constant wars with which Italy was plagued, by the
dissensions of her petty states and republics, there was a demand for
native hardihood.

The successive members of the Monte Beni family showed valor and policy
enough' at all events, to keep their hereditary possessions out of the
clutch of grasping neighbors, and probably differed very little from the
other feudal barons with whom they fought and feasted. Such a degree
of conformity with the manners of the generations through which it
survived, must have been essential to the prolonged continuance of the
race.

It is well known, however, that any here