head upon his knees, and by the light of the torches recognised Caesar.

Thus fell, on the 10th of March, 1507, on an unknown field, near an
obscure village called Viane, in a wretched skirmish with the vassal of
a petty king, the man whom Macchiavelli presents to all princes as the
model of ability, diplomacy, and courage.

As to Lucrezia, the fair Duchess of Ferrara, she died full of years,
and honours, adored as a queen by her subjects, and sung as a goddess by
Ariosto and by Bembo.

EPILOGUE

There was once in Paris, says Boccaccio, a brave and good merchant named
Jean de Civigny, who did a great trade in drapery, and was connected in
business with a neighbour and fellow-merchant, a very rich man called
Abraham, who, though a Jew, enjoyed a good reputation. Jean de Civigny,
appreciating the qualities of the worthy Israelite; feared lest, good
man as he was, his false religion would bring his soul straight to
eternal perdition; so he began to urge him gently as a friend to
renounce his errors and open his eyes to the Christian faith, which he
could see for himself was prospering and spreading day by day, being the
only true and good religion; whereas his own creed, it was very plain,
was so quickly diminishing that it would soon disappear from the face of
the earth. The Jew replied that except in his own religion there was no
salvation, that he was born in it, proposed to live and die in it, and
that he knew nothing in the world that could change his opinion. Still,
in his proselytising fervour Jean would not think himself beaten,
and never a day passed but he demonstrated with those fair words the
merchant uses to seduce a customer, the superiority of the Christian
religion above the Jewish; and although Abraham was a great master of
Mosaic law, he began to enjoy his friend's preaching, either because of
the friendship he felt for him or because the Holy Ghost descended upon
the tongue of the new apostle; still obstinate in his own belief, he
would not change. The more he persisted in his error, the more excited
was Jean about converting him, so that at last, by God's help, being
somewhat shaken by his friend's urgency, Abraham one day said--

"Listen, Jean: since you have it so much at heart that I should be
converted, behold me disposed to satisfy you; but before I go to Rome to
see him whom you call God's vicar on earth, I must study his manner of
life and his morals, as also those of his brethren the