d on a shield, or as a crest, or as the
badge of the family, and it is found in many a threadbare tapestry, in
many a painting, in the frescos and carved ornaments of many a dim old
church in Rome.

[Illustration: FOUNTAIN OF TREVI]

In their history, the first fact that stands out is their adherence to
the Emperors, as Ghibellines, whereas their rivals, the Orsini, were
Guelphs and supporters of the Church in most of the great contests of
the Middle Age. The exceptions to the rule are found when the Colonna
had a Pope of their own, or one who, like Nicholas the Fourth, was of
their own making. 'That Pope,' says Muratori, 'had so boundlessly
favoured the aggrandizement of the Colonna that his actions depended
entirely upon their dictates, and a libel was published upon him,
entitled the Source of Evil, illustrated by a caricature, in which the
mitred head of the Pontiff was seen issuing from a tall column between
two smaller ones, the latter intended to represent the two living
cardinals of the house, Jacopo and Pietro.' Yet in the next reign, when
they impeached the election of Boniface the Eighth, they found
themselves in opposition to the Holy See, and they and theirs were
almost utterly destroyed by the Pope's partisans and kinsmen, the
powerful Caetani.

Just before him, after the Holy See had been vacant for two years and
nearly four months, because the Conclave of Perugia could not agree upon
a Pope, a humble southern hermit of the Abruzzi, Pietro da Morrone, had
been suddenly elevated to the Pontificate, to his own inexpressible
surprise and confusion, and after a few months of honest, but utterly
fruitless, effort to understand and do what was required of him, he had
taken the wholly unprecedented step of abdicating the papacy. He was
succeeded by Benedict Caetani, Boniface the Eighth, keen, learned,
brave, unforgiving and the mortal foe of the Colonna; 'the magnanimous
sinner,' as Gibbon quotes from a chronicle, 'who entered like a fox,
reigned like a lion and died like a dog.' Yet the judgment is harsh, for
though his sins were great, the expiation was fearful, and he was brave
as few men have been.

Samson slew a lion with his hands, and the Philistines with the jaw-bone
of an ass. Men have always accepted the Bible's account of the
slaughter. But when an ass, without the aid of any Samson, killed a lion
in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Priori, in Florence, the event was
looked upon as of evil porten