or three days had passed thus, the Grand
Duke died; and the next morning Bianca
lay dead too. The Cardinal was proclaimed
heir; and buried his brother with all possible
princely honours, but that "wretch Bianca"
he ordered to be sown up in a sheet and flung
into tho common burial-place of the outcast
poor.

Olympia Pamfili was not much more
respectable than Bianca Cappello. Her time
of flourishing was between fifteen hundred
and ninety-four and sixteen hundred and
fifty-six, and her mode of influence was by
means of the old dotard Pope Innocent the
Tenth, her brother-in-law. Him she governed
with no light hand; living at the Vatican,
selling places and powers at usurious rates;
and comporting herself with so much cynical
indifference to public opinion, as to make
herself the butt of lampooning Rome, and
the wonder and abhorrence of all Christian
Europe. She was remarkable only for this
unheard-of power and public position, and
for the enormous amount of money amassed
by her simoniacal practices. She used to
carry to her own palace from the Vatican, by
night, whole sacks of gold and precious
jewels, leaving the Pope safely locked up in
his own chamber during her absence. When
he died, Olympia was sent for by the new
Pope to Orvieto, to render an account, and
probably to disgorge: but the pestilence
struck her as soon as she got there, and so
saved her from a more shameful and more
painful death.

Beneath the same stone, in the church of
the Dominicans at Bologna, lie Guido Reni
and Elizabetta Sirani; "he full of years and
honours, at the ripe age of sixty-seven; she
cut off untimely in the morning of her
working-day, at twenty-six." Of Elisabetta's life,
there is nothing singularly dramatic
preserved: she was simply a thorough artist,
living in and for her art alone, brave, cheerful
and determined, as a working woman should
be; painting more rapidly than anyone else
could do, so that to see her work was one of the
sights of Bologna, and with a more thorough
and correct improvisation of pencil than falls
to the lot of most to gain. Her death,
however, was tragic enough in its suddenness, and
the suspicion which it caused to fall on an
innocent girl—one Lucia, the family servant,
who had lately left her place, owing to the
sharp tongue of the old mother Sirani.
Modern science knows how that Elisabetta
died of ulcer in the stomach, but Middle-Age
ignorance and suspicion added that this ulcer
was caused by poison. Whereupon Lucia
Tolomelli, the dismissed servant, ran all the
chance in the world of being tortured and
put to death, on the charge of having
poisoned her; all on the evidence of an old
woman, whose basin of soup she had peppered
somewhat too highly! Luckily, nothing
came of the charge; and poor Elisabetta was
followed to her grave by all Bologna, and her
pure and gentle memory was not polluted by
any bloody sacrifice made to her manes.

The last of Mr. Trollope's Decade is La
Corilla, a pastoral poetess, who was crowned
with laurel at the Capitol in Rome, in the
year seventeen hundred and seventy-six. La
Corilla was the actual Corinna of history; the
flesh and blood reality of De Staël's delightful
fiction; the last of the laurel-crowned
in the old Capitol, which had seen so many
kings and queens of the same dynasty in its
time. And this crowning was the one
noteworthy event of La Corilla's life: before and
after comes nothing to record. She wrote
poetry, lived reputably, was crowned, and
died: and history adds no fifth stanza to
the little life-ode so summed up.

Corilla worthily concludes a worthy and
most charming book: one which will carry
the Trollope fame both further and higher
than it has yet reached: a book for which
we may be all grateful, as for a literary
treasury of noble thoughts.

BARON WALD.

WHAT led to the old gentleman's
misfortune, said the old lady, who told me the
story of Sir Henry Hayes,* that is to say,
what crime he had committed, I am not
quite sure; but I think my husband said the
Baron's offence was following to England a
countryman of his own, and shooting him in
the streets of London, in order to avenge the
wrong which the victim had inflicted on a
member of his ancient family. As the offence
was committed on British soil, he became
amenable to British laws, which punish
murder with death, except in those cases
where the sovereign exercises his prerogative
—as George the Third did in the case of the
Baron, who, immediately on his arrival, was
provided with separate apartments in the
prisoners' barracks, and informed that he
might employ his time as he pleased. There
could be no question that the Baron was a
person of some importance in Germany; for
I happen to know that special instructions
were forwarded from home to the Colonial
Government, and periodical reports required
as to his state of health and the nature of his
occupations. It was, in short, evident that,
although the old Baron had grossly violated
our laws, and had paid, or was paying, the
modified penalty thereof, he was still regarded
by some of the loftiest in the mother country,
as an object of sympathy and commiseration.
* See No. 474, p. 4S9.

My husband had a grant of land about
seventeen or eighteen miles from Sydney.
Through this land the river—called George's
River—runs. There are several very pretty
sites for houses; but there is one in
particular, where the river bends itself very
fantastically, and tall Australian oak-trees
grow upon the very edge of the banks. The