illed such straggling guards as
they could find; then the Germans turned and mowed them down, and killed
a thousand of the best, while the Pierleoni, as often before, looked on
in sullen neutrality from Sant' Angelo, waiting to take the side of the
winner. Then the Emperor and the Pope departed together, leaving Rome to
its factions and its parties.

Suddenly Arnold of Brescia is with them, a prisoner, but how taken no
man can surely tell. And with them also, by Soracte, far out in the
northern Campagna, is Di Vico, the Prefect, to judge the leader of the
people. The Pope and the Emperor may have looked on, while Di Vico
judged the heretic and the rebel; but they did not themselves judge him.
The Prefect, Lord of Viterbo, had been long at war with the new-formed
Senate and the city, and owed Arnold bitter hatred and grudge.

The end was short. Arnold told them all boldly that his teaching was
just, and that he would die for it. He knelt down, lifted up his hands
to heaven, and commended his soul to God. Then they hanged him, and when
he was dead they burnt his body and scattered the ashes in the river,
lest any relics of him should be taken to Rome to work new miracles of
revolution. No one knows just where he died, but only that it was most
surely far out in the Campagna, in the hot summer days, in the year
1155, and not within the city, as has been so often asserted.

He was a martyr--whether in a good cause or a foolish one, let those
judge who call themselves wise; there was no taint of selfishness in
him, no thought of ambition for his own name, and there was no spot upon
his life in an age of which the evils cannot be written down, and are
better not guessed. He died for something in which he believed enough to
die for it, and belief cannot be truer to itself than that. So far as
the Church of today may speak, all Churchmen know that his heresies of
faith, if they were real, were neither great nor vital, and that he was
put to death, not for them, but because he was become the idol and the
prophet of a rebellious city. His doctrine had spread over Italy, his
words had set the country aflame, his mere existence was a lasting cause
of bloody strife between city and city, princes and people, nobles and
vassals. The times were not ripe, and in the inevitable course of fate
it was foreordained that he must perish, condemned by Popes and
Emperors, Kings and Princes; but of all whole-souled reformers, of all
patriot le