rouse at night do make thee ill,
For morning medicine drink of wine thy fill")

Let us hope that this extraordinary receipt for "hot coppers" was intended
satirically, or else given seriously as the only advice that a confirmed
toper was likely to follow in any case. But the use of classical adjuncts
to adorn Christian tombs, which to-day appears so incongruous to us, was
popular enough at the time of the Renaissance, and readers of Robert
Browning's poetry will call to mind the story of the dying Bishop's
injunction to his heirs concerning his tomb in St Praxed's church at Rome:

"The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me,
Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchance
Some tripod thyrsus with a vase or so,
The Saviour at His sermon on the mount,
Saint Praxed in a glory, and one Pan
Ready to twitch the Nymph's last garment off,
And Moses with the tables...."

But it is necessary to shake off the spirit of Renaissance dilettantism
before we venture to approach the chapel of John of Procida to the right
of the high altar, where stands the stern figure of the greatest of the
medieval Pontiffs. Above the marble statue of the Caesar of the Papacy,
that was tardily erected to his memory by the unfortunate Pio Nono, appear
the glittering mosaics of the apse of the chapel, from which look down the
figures of John of Procida and of King Manfred, the last sovereign prince
of the hated Suabian line that Gregory twice anathematized. Beneath the
cold forbidding eye of the last of the Hohenstaufen and his friend and
avenger here rest, strangely enough, the ashes of that "great and
inflexible asserter of the supremacy of the sacerdotal order: the monk
Hildebrand, afterwards Pope Gregory the Seventh." Born the son of a poor
carpenter in the Tuscan village of Soana, this extraordinary man rose to
eminence as a monk of Cluny, where he became famous for his extreme
asceticism of life in an age of undisguised clerical corruption and
luxury, when simony, lay investiture and priestly marriages were the rule
rather than the exception on all sides, so that but few Churchmen were
able to rise above their surrounding temptations. Such few as could resist
the world, the flesh and the devil were accounted, and not unfrequently
were in reality, ignorant crazy fanatics, half-pitied and half-despised.
Between these two extremes of worldly indulgence and of unreasoning
severity of life, Hildebrand ever pursued a middle course, for wh