nous plants--nightshade, and hemlock,
and green-flowered hellebore; but wicked monks had sometimes been sucked
into them while digging the ground, or decoyed into their labyrinths by
devils. Was it possible that there had lingered on through the ages a
vague and horrified remembrance of those rites, the discovery of whose
mysterious and wide-spread abominations had frozen Rome with horror in
her most high and palmy days; and was there a connection between those
neophytes, wandering with blood-stained limbs and dishevelled locks
among the groves of the Aventine, then rushing to quench their burning
torches in the Tiber, two centuries before Christ, and the devils who
troubled the Benedictines of SS. Jervase and Protasius? These evil
spirits would appear, it had been said, in the cloisters of the convent,
processions carrying lights and garlands; and on certain nights, when
the monks were in prayer in their cells, strange sounds would issue
from the church itself, of flutes and timbrels, and demon laughter, and
demon voices chanting some unknown litany, and clearly aping the mass;
and Cardinal Capranica was blamed by many pious persons for his rash
intention of filling once more the deserted convent, and exposing holy
men to the wrath of such very pertinacious devils. Meanwhile mass upon
mass was said to clear the place of this demoniac infection. It was in
this church that the sacrilege of Domenico and Filarete rose to its
highest, and that an event took place which the men of the fifteenth
century could scarce find words to designate.

Domenico had grown tired of his friend's archaeological impieties.
It gave him no satisfaction to pour out wine, burn incense, arrange
garlands, and even cut the throats of animals according to a correct
Pagan ritual. It was nothing to him that Horace and Ovid and Tibullus
should have done alike. He was a good Christian, never doubting for
a moment the power of the Blessed Virgin, the saints, and even the
smallest and meanest priest, nor the heat of hell-fire. But he wanted to
have the secret of antique proportions, and he was convinced that this
secret could be communicated only by a Pagan divinity, just as certain
theological mysteries, such as the use of the rosary, had been revealed
to the saints by Christ or the Virgin. The Pagan gods were devils, and
to hold communication with devils was mortal sin and sure damnation. But
lots of people communicated with devils for much more paltry m