so poor and unworthy that it had better not have been set up at
all. A curious book might be written upon the vicissitudes of great
men's bones.

Opposite the Farnesina stands the great Palazzo Corsini, once the
habitation of the Riario family, whose history is a catalogue of
murders, betrayals, and all possible crimes, and whose only redeeming
light in a long history was that splendid and brave Catherine Sforza,
married to one of their name, who held the fortress of Forli so bravely
against Caesar Borgia, who challenged him to single combat, which he
refused out of shame, who was overcome by him at last, and brought
captive to the Vatican in chains of gold, as Aurelian brought Zenobia.
In the days of her power she had lived in the great palace for a time.
It looks modern now; it was once a place of evil fame, and is said to
have been one of the few palaces in Rome which contained one of those
deadly shafts, closed by a balanced trap door that dropped the living
victim who stepped upon it a hundred and odd feet at a fall, out of
hearing and out of sight for ever. From the Riario it was bought at
last, in 1738, by the Corsini, and when they began to repair it, they
found the bones of the nameless dead in heaps far down among the
foundations.

There also lived Christina, Queen of Sweden, of romantic and execrable
memory, for twenty years; and here she died, the strangest compound of
greatness, heroism, vanity and wickedness that ever was woman to the
destruction of man; ending her terrible life in an absorbing passion for
art and literature which attracted to itself all that was most delicate
and refined at the end of the seventeenth century; dabbling in alchemy,
composing verses forgotten long ago, discoursing upon art with Bernini,
dictating the laws of verse to the poet Guidi, collecting together a
vast library of rare books and a great gallery of great pictures, and
of engravings and medals and beautiful things of every sort--the only
woman, perhaps, who was ever like Lucrezia Borgia, and outdid her in all
ways.

Long before her time, a Riario, the Cardinal of Saint George, had like
tastes and drew about him the thinkers and the writers of his age, when
the Renascence was at its climax and the Constable of Bourbon had not
yet been shot down at the walls a few hundred yards from the Corsini
palace, bequeathing the plunder of Rome to his Spaniards and Germans.
Here Erasmus spent those hours of delight of which he el