er their children's heads for debt, fifty-five years after his death.
The swineherd's race was prodigal, excepting the 'Great Friar' himself,
and, like the Prodigal Son, it was not long before the Peretti were
reduced to eating the husks.

It was natural that the palaces of the Renascence should rise along the
only straight street of any length in what was then the inhabited part
of the city, and that the great old Roman Barons, the Colonna, the
Orsini, the Caetani, should continue to live in their strongholds, where
they had always dwelt. The Caetani, indeed, once bought from a
Florentine banker what is now the Ruspoli palace, and Sciarra Colonna
had lived far down the Corso; but with these two exceptions, the
princely habitations between the Piazza del Popolo and the Piazza di
Venezia are almost all the property of families once thought foreigners
in Rome. The greatest, the most magnificent private dwelling in the
world is the Doria Pamfili palace, as the Doria themselves were the most
famous, and became the most powerful of those many nobles who, in the
course of centuries, settled in the capital and became Romans, not only
in name but in fact--Doria, Borghese, Rospigliosi, Pallavicini and
others of less enduring fame or reputation, who came in the train or
alliance of a Pope, and remained in virtue of accumulated riches and
acquired honour.

Two hundred and fifty years have passed since a council of learned
doctors and casuists decided for Pope Innocent the Tenth the precise
limit of his just power to enrich his nephews and relations, the
Pamfili, by an alliance with whom the original Doria of Genoa added
another name to their own, and inherited the vast estates. But nearly
four hundred years before Innocent, the Doria had been high admirals and
almost despots of Genoa. For they were a race of seamen from the first,
in a republic where seamanship was the first essential to distinction.
Albert Doria overcame the Pisans off Meloria in 1284, slaying five
thousand, and taking eleven thousand prisoners. Conrad, his son, was
'Captain of the Genoese Freedom,' and 'Captain of the People.' Lamba
Doria vanquished the Venetians under the brave Andrea Dandolo, and
Paganino Doria conquered them again under another Andrea Dandolo; and
then an Andrea Doria took service with the Pope, and became the greatest
sailor in Europe, the hero of a hundred sea-fights, at one time the ally
of Francis the First of France, and the most danger