saw a figure which I shall never forget. It was
that of an "old young lady," on whom some
fifty winters had cast their blighting influence,
but who, nevertheless, maintained a youthful
style in her dress and general appearance which
was very dreadful to behold, and to support
which the resources of art had been had recourse
to in a very unmistakable manner. She was
sitting in an empty room, with the lights flaring
and the daylight streaming in upon her, and was
playing at patience at a deserted card-table. It
was a celebrated beauty who was thus occupied,
and as I looked and remembered what she was
once, and what she might have been, I asked
myself whether this was a brilliant termination to
a career?

There is no dress in the warehouse of Messrs.
Howell and James which will so set off and
decorate a woman's charms, believe me, as that
garb which she weaves about her by her own
good deeds. There is no splendour of
decoration which will win for her the admiration—
to put it on no higher ground—which the
reputation that she has ordered her household
well, will gain for her from all the world.
There is no wreath of flowers, no coronet
of jewels, which will surround her head with
such a blaze of glory, as this report—that, as a
wife and as a mother, she lived without a fault.
Let my girls once get this into their heads. Let
them once feel assured that they come out to
more advantage—a million-fold—occupied in
their home duties, than in the gayest ball-dresses
that modern ingenuity can devise; once let
these things be thoroughly recognised, and I
think I may answer for it that the Registrar-
General will not have to complain of a decline
in the number of marriages, and that Sir
Creswell Creswell will have an easier time of it than
he has had of late.

VITTORIA ACCORAMBONI.
A TRUE ITALIAN HISTORY. IN NINE CHAPTERS.

CHAPTER VII. A WEDDING EXCURSION.

THE remark of one of the biographers of
Sixtus—the monk Tempesti—on the conduct of
the Pope towards Orsini, is too curiously
illustrative of the moral sense and notions of the
time to be passed over. The disobedience of
the prince to the precept forbidding him to
marry Vittoria, would have afforded, says the
monk, an excellent opportunity of taking
vengeance for the murder of Peretti. But, having
pardoned the first offence when cardinal, Sixtus
did not like immediately to punish the second as
pope. He, therefore, intimated to him the order
to send away his bandit followers, so that if he
disobeyed this command "this fault might serve
as an opportunity of punishing the first most
heinous offence. A sentiment truly worthy and
princely/"

The general course of the conduct and
administration of Sixtus, however, were such as
to justify us in believing that his sentiments
were less princely than his admiring biographer
supposes on this occasion. There seems no
reason to doubt that he absolutely spoke
sincerely, and meant what he said, intending to
let bygones be bygones, and to act no more
severely towards Orsini in the matter of the
bandits kept in pay by him, than he did to all
the other ruffian nobles of Rome on the same
subject.

It never seems, however, to have occurred to
Orsini for an instant that the Pope meant
nothing more than what he said. That glance
from the eye of the man whose kinsman he had
murdered seemed to him quite a sufficient
assurance that Rome was no longer any place for
him. Perhaps, also, he felt no desire to inhabit
a city in which law and order were henceforth
to be paramount. So he came from the
presence of Sixtus, and told Vittoria that they
must seek a home elsewhere. She, on her part,
was ready enough to turn her back on Rome,
for Rome was beginning, we are told, to turn its
back on her. Not by any means, it must be
understood, because it was felt that her conduct
had been base, unwomanly, or criminal, but
because it had been imprudent, and wanting in
sagacity and judgment. "There is no telling,"
says the historian, " the tittle-tattle and gossip
of the Roman ladies about her. One of them,
a person of high rank, who had at first been
very fond of her, could not refrain from saying,
disdainfully, 'See, now, what that silly fool
Vittoria has done for herself! She might have
been the first princess in Rome; and she has
taken for a husband a living gangrene, full of
sores, and fifty years old!'"

It is worth noting that to be the wife of a
pope's favourite nephew, even though pope and
nephew be peasant born, is evidently deemed by
the Roman dames of rank a higher position than
to be wife to the proudest and most powerful lay
baron in Italy. And in a society far too corrupt
to recognise honourableness as anything different
from profit and power, or to estimate it except
in proportion to its productiveness of these, the
examples of the Riarci, the Borgias, and the
Farnesi, abundantly justify the correctness of
their appreciation. Vittoria' s mother, it may be
said, was of a different opinion. But the choice
before her was not between Orsini and a pope's
nephew, but between the latter and one who
might, or who possibly might never, become the
former. It is further very noticeable that the
lady of rank who calls Vittoria "a silly fool"
—(matta)—for having played her cards as she
hail done, evidently takes it for granted that she
was a consenting party to the murder of her
first husband, inasmuch as on no other
supposition could it be said that she might have been,
as Francesco Peretti's wife, the greatest princess
in Rome.

It was about the middle of June, 1585, not
quite two months after the election of Sixtus,
that Orsini and his wife left Rome. A pretext
for their departure—for such a step could not
with any decorum be taken by such a personage
in those days without a false reason to hide the
true one—was found in the recommendation of