lea. There, was no power on earth to save him--and his fault was so
light! A man more honourable did not exist. The purity of Constantia was
more safe in his hands than in any others--he loved her so well.

We are not sufficiently in the "tragic vein" to follow the prisoner
through the last hours of his confinement, and of his existence. To be
struck dead in the flush of life, with all his passions in full bloom upon
him, was a hard decree. Sometimes he protested vehemently against the
palpable injustice and cruelty of his sentence; but, in general, he found
his consolation in the mournful sentiment, that had he lived, he should
have been miserable--for the great desire of his life was doomed to be
thwarted. "I told you," he said one day to his friend Petrarch, "that
this love would work my destruction. It has so; but its great misery has
made destruction itself indifferent."

We willingly draw a veil over the last fatal scene, and all the horrors
that precede a public death. Throughout this scene his courage never
forsook him; but flashes of uncontrollable indignation would occasionally
break from him, and occasionally a sigh of more tender despondency would
escape. The last tear he shed, the last complaint he murmured, was still
to the coldness of Constantia: "We should have been so happy, had she
loved--and now!--"

History records that the execution of Giacomo, as well by infringing the
supposed privileges of the university as by the indignation it excited in
the large circle of his friends and companions, nearly led to the
withdrawal of the university from the town of Bologna. The students and
the professors seceded in a mass, and retired to Sienna. No entreaties
could bring them back; the glory of Bologna might have been extinguished
for ever. The Podesta and other magistrates of the town were compelled at
length to send a solemn deputation. They promised, in future, to respect
their privileges; and, by raising the salaries of the professors, and some
other popular measures, they eventually prevailed upon them to return.

Petrarch had not left the city with the rest--he had lingered behind to
perform the last rites and honours to the remains of Giacomo--to raise the
tomb and inscribe it with his verse.

Upon that tomb the solitary moon was now shining. But who was that figure
robed in deepest black that knelt beside it, so sadly, with so desponding
a stillness, her forehead pressed against the marble? Was it, t