the same token, robbed the world of an epic in twenty-five
books. Cino heard of it some time afterwards, and in due season was
shown her tomb at Monte della Sambuca high on the Apennine, a grey stone
solitary in a grey waste of shale. There he pondered the science of
which, while she was so strangely ignorant, he had now become an adept;
there, or thereabouts, he composed the most beautiful of all his rhymes,
the _canzone_ which may stand for an elegy of the Lady Selvaggia.

"Ay me, alas! the beautiful bright hair,--"

Ay me, indeed! And thus he ends:

"Ay me, sharp Death! till what I ask is done
And my whole life is ended utterly,--
Answer,--must I weep on
Even thus, and never cease to moan _ay me_?"[2]

He might well ask. It should be accorded him that he was worthy of the
occasion: the poem is very fine. But I think the good man did well
enough after this; I know that if he was sad he was most melodiously
sad. He throve; he became a professor; his wife bore him five children.
His native city has done him what honour she could, ousted his surname
in favour of her own, set up a pompous monument in the Cathedral Church
(where little Selvaggia heard her dull mass), and dubbed him once and
for all, _L'amoroso Messer Cino da Pistoja_. That should suffice him. As
for the young Selvaggia, I suppose her bones are dust of the Apennine.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] The translation is Rossetti's.

THE JUDGMENT OF BORSO

"Unde proverbii loco etiamnunc usurpatur, praeteriisse Borsii
tempora."--_Este Chronicle_.

I

THE ADVENTURERS

It is happily as unnecessary as it would be unwise to inquire into the
ancestry of Bellaroba, a meek-eyed girl of Venice, with whom I have here
some concern. Her mother was La Fragiletta, of the Old Ghetto, and her
father may have been of the Council of Ten, or possibly a Doge. No one
could deny it, for no one knew his name. It is certain that his daughter
was not christened as she was called, equally certain that the nickname
fitted her. _Bella roba_, a pretty thing, she always had been for her
mother's many friends; _bella roba_ in truth she looked, as La
Fragiletta fastened her dark red dress, stuck a bunch of carnations in
the bosom of it, and pulled up the laces round her slim neck, on a
certain May morning in or about the year 1469. "The shape you are,
child," said that industrious woman, "I can do nothing for you in
Venice. It is as timid