What the great Robert Boyle would have said
to such a superstition as this, it would be dangerous
to guess; but he had a belief in a somewhat
similar charm. He relates that he found
the moss of a dead man's skull, brought from
Ireland, effectual in stopping a bleeding at the
nose which nothing else would abate. But for
this, there might be a chemical reason. Boyle,
however, gives one of a more mechanical kind,
trenching on mysticism. The human body
being exceedingly porous, the effluvia of the
amulet may, he argues, in time find an ingress
into the habit, owing to an agreement between
the pores of the skin and the figure of the corpuscles.
Other learned authors have written to
the same effect; but the opinion has long been
reckoned among exploded fallacies.

THE DUCHESS VERONICA.

IN EIGHT CHAPTERS.
CHAPTER I. FAMINE, PESTILENCE, AND
MARRIAGE.

BY the united efforts of the Emperor Charles
the Fifth, and the Medicean Pope, Clement the
Seventh, liberty was finally destroyed, and the
despotism of the Medici established in Florence
in the year 1531. In the year 1631, Ferdinand
the Second, the fifth grand-duke, was reigning
in Tuscany; and a hundred years of despotism
had done their work on the country according
to the immutable laws in such cases appointed
and ordained.

At the former epoch there was assuredly
much passing among those lovely vine-and-olive-clad
hills, and beneath those pure azure skies,
which might have made angels weep, if we are
to suppose them to look down on the fair earth
man has inhabited, and the use he makes of it.
There was blood on all the land, in the streets
of every fair city, and almost on every smiling
hill-side. Liberty died hard and slowly, amid
convulsive throes, social confusion, and multi-form
violence. There was deadly feud between
family and family, and in many cases between
fathers and sons. There were crimes, treasons,
falsehoods, follies, short-comings innumerable.
But there were also some heroisms; and, until
hope was finally crushed, there were many noble
aspirations. Intellect was awake and was winning
some of its noblest triumphs. Even material
prosperity, and the creation of wealth,
which had risen to so marvellous a height
under the old municipal freedom, though sadly
injured and hindered by the prevailing disorder
and violence, was not smitten with paralysis.
For, industry and energy were yet alive; and—
as a rich soil cultivated with difficulty amid
rocks and tree-stumps will give golden harvests
—contrived, despite all impediments, to realise
magnificent results.

In the year 1631, every feature of this picture
had become changed. The country presented
every symptom of moral and material decrepitude.
From having occupied the highest rank in Europe
in literature, science, and art, Tuscany, and Italy
generally, were rapidly sinking to all but the
lowest. Vast wealth indeed remained, the produce,
either of former activity and enterprise,
or of a legislation craftily contrived by means
of monopolies and such like suicidal devices, to
gather into a few hands at the expense of general
pauperisation. The grand-dukes themselves,
especially, had by such means amassed
enormous treasures. But wealth thus collected
into unreproductive masses engenders a social
malaria as pestilential as that caused physically
by huge bodies of stagnant water, instead of
the beneficent and fertilising effect which resembles
that of the same element duly distributed
and put into motion. Agriculture was
neglected; commerce well-nigh annihilated;
population was decreasing. But "order" had
been established. All was very orderly in
Church and State. There were no rebellions
and no heresies. No man dreamed of disputing
the absolute authority of the government over
his body, or of the church over his soul. Not,
indeed, that this "order" ensured safety to
life and property in the one department, or any
tolerably satisfactory state of religious and
moral feeling in the other. For, the stiletto of
the assassin was rife in the streets and palaces
of Florence; and rarely—saving always of
course at Rome—has the world seen such utter
demoralisation and general dissoluteness combined
with profuse religious professions and
practices, as prevailed under Medicean rule.

Then there came upon all that festering mass
of wickedness, laziness, folly, luxury, misery,
prodigality, beggary, ignorance, and general incapacity
of all sorts—"visitations of God"—came
as surely as comets return in their course; and
they were visitations of God as certainly as are
marsh-fevers from the fens on the sluggards who
will not drain them, and all the other penal and
teaching evils, resulting from man's mismanagement
of the moral and material elements which
the all-wise Creator has destined to furnish his
rewards, his punishments, and his education.

Pestilence came, and famine came. And, as
we find from the historians, without surprise,
all the means which were adopted for the remedy
of these evils only seemed to make matters
worse. The gathering of masses of the people
in processions and in the churches to implore
the interposition of the Virgin did not stay the
pestilence; and the prohibition of all commercial
intercourse or transport of commodities, failed
to alleviate the scarcity. But though we may
not be astonished at these phenomena, the
seventeenth-century Tuscans were so. It. was
a terrible disgrazia; a tremendous indication
that the "favour" of Heaven was withdrawn
from the land. And every man saw in the
general affliction, a castigation due to the sins
of his neighbours.

It does not appear to have occurred to many
that their own sins had aught to do with the
judgment, which all agreed that the general
wickedness of the community had brought down
upon it. The religious frame of mind indicated
by the prevalence of such reflections does
not seem to have availed in any degree to effect
any improvement in the general morality. On