esh exhortations on the part of the holy
man who had been favored by them. The upshot is well known: Ciuco
followed the advice of Saint Philomena and lost his dukedom.

Sometimes, however, this submission of his mind to his clergy was not
altogether proof against a certain simple shrewdness, aided perhaps by
an inclination to save money, to which he was said not to be
insensible. Of course his grandfather, the enlightened and reforming
Duke Leopold I., had not been at all in the good graces of the Church,
and for a series of years Leopold II. had been in the habit of giving
a sum of money for masses for the repose of the soul of his
grandfather. But upon one occasion it happened that the archbishop of
Lucca (a very special hierarchical big-wig, and the greatest
ecclesiastical authority in those parts, being, by reason of some
ancient and peculiar privileges, a greater man than even the
archbishop of Florence), in the course of an argument with the grand
duke, the object of which was to induce the latter to modify in some
respects some of those anti-ecclesiastical measures by which the elder
Leopold had made the prosperity of Tuscany, was so far carried away by
his zeal as to declare that the author of the obnoxious constitutions
which he wished altered had incurred eternal damnation by the
enactment of them. The grand duke bent his head humbly before the
archiepiscopal denunciation, and said nothing in reply. But when the
time came round for the disbursement of the annual sum for masses for
Leopold I., his pious grandson declared that it was useless to spend
any more money for that purpose, for that the archbishop of Lucca had
informed him that his unhappy predecessor's soul was in hell, and
accordingly past help and past being prayed--or paid--for.

I remember an amusing instance of the same sort of simple shrewdness
on the lookout for the main chance which was exemplified in the above
anecdote showing itself in quite a different sphere. There was in
those days living in Florence an Englishman bearing the name of
Sloane. He had made a large fortune by the intelligent and
well-ordered management of some copper-mines in the neighborhood of
Volterra, which in his hands had turned out to be of exceptional and
unexpected richness. He was a man who did much good with his money,
and was considered a very valuable and important citizen of his
adopted country. He was a Roman Catholic too, which made him all the
more acceptabl