that must be admitted. In the first place—and
this was the consideration that chiefly weighed
with the prudent and wary father — the whole of
the powerful and unscrupulous Orsini clan would
doubtless be furious at such a mismarriage on
the part of its chief. And there were other very
influential personages likely to be highly offended
by the marriage. It was not without reason, in
short, that Count Claudio Accoramboni
considered the connexion, however flattering, as
doubly hazardous. Then, again, the noble Orsini
had, about two years previously, murdered his
first wife. Not that such a circumstance could
be held in any wise to sully the character of one
in the unattackable position of the Prince Orsini,
or that any great weight should be attributed to
an accident that would frequently happen in the
noblest families. Still, Vittoria's father thought
that, all other things being equal, it might be held
to be an objection to a son-in-law in the eyes of a
fond parent; while her mamma felt strongly that
in the case of a prince, it was mere invidious
cavilling to rake up matters of a kind that were
never alluded to in really good society. Again:
though of course no nobility could be more
exalted, more undoubted, more ancient and
celebrated than that of the chief of the great house
of Orsini, whose names are to be found on every
page of the history of their country for hundreds
of years back, as the constant disturbers of
peaceful life and social progress, by their noble
determination to be subject to no law save that
of their own fierce will, though all the world
recognised this nobility as of the purest water
and most genuine dye, yet, somehow or other,
old Dame Nature, obstinately taking note only of
his highness's manner of life, had got it into
her stupid old head that he was not noble at all,
but to a remarkable degree the reverse. Not
that it would have signified a rush what Dame
Nature, with her old-fashioned notions, might
have thought about the matter, had it not been
that she had unfortunately found the means of
expressing her opinion so emphatically, that it
was impossible not to be more or less annoyed
by it. It was now fifty years that she had been
making up her mind as to the genuineness of the
nobility of the most noble prince; and she now
announced her opinion on the subject to the
world by fashioning him into the most hideously
bloated caricature of the human form and face
divine that a nightmare fancy could conceive
He was, we are told, so enormously fat, that his
leg was as large round as an ordinary man's body
And one of these huge unnaturally bloated limbs
was afflicted with a loathsome cancerous affection,
named, we are told by the science of that
good old time, a "lupa," or she-wolf, because it
was necessary continually to supply it with
abundant applications of raw flesh, in order that,
exerting on them its destroying power, it might
so the more spare the living tissues of the noble
patient's body. It might seem, on the whole,
to the livers in a degenerate age, that these
circumstances might also have weighed somewhat
in the estimate of the prince as a bridegroom,
formed by the young lady and her family. But
they do not appear to have done so. And the
facts have been preserved by the contemporary
writers only as the envious talk of other Roman
ladies, mothers and daughters, who would fain
have secured the noble prince, lupa and all, for
themselves.

Strange, is it not, to note how entirely
changed our nineteenth century world is from a
state of society in which noble matrons and
damsels could be led by such feelings to indulge
in such talk! What do May Fair drawing-
rooms care about the fifty years, or other drawbacks,
of great catches in the matrimonial market,
that have been already caught? But Roman
sixteenth-century saloons did, as it seems, find
no little delectation in such considerations.

That other little circumstance of the removal
of his first wife by the agency of his highness's
own noble hands, though it was by no means felt
to have cast any stain on the prince's fair fame
as a knight and a gentleman, or to have rendered
him generally on that account a less desirable
family connexion, yet was one of the causes
that, as prudent Count Accoramboni perceived,
contributed to surround a marriage between his
daughter and the prince with especial danger.
For the first Princess Orsini, thus removed, was
no other than Isabella dei Medici, the sister of
Francis, the reigning Duke of Florence, and of
the Cardinal Ferdinand dei Medici, one of the
most powerful of the Sacred College. Now
this poor Isabella had unhappily been led,
by the total neglect of her noble husband,
to requite his conduct to her in such sort,
as to make her death no less necessary
to the honour of her "serene" and
most reverend" brothers, than to that of her
husband. So much so, that the former, far from
feeling any estrangement from their brother-in-
law on that account, considered themselves
beholden to him for his nice care for the reputation
of the family. And, notwithstanding any little
unpleasantness as to the manner of their dear
departed sister's death, the duke and the
cardinal would have felt that the "honour" of
the Medici family was dreadfully compromised
by their brother-in-law making so shocking a
misalliance. And Count Accoramboni wisely
considered that it might not pay in the long run
to encounter such enmities, even to make his
daughter Princess Orsini.

But no prudent considerations of this kind
could induce his lady wife to give up the dear
vision of becoming mother-in-law to a prince.
Despite his fifty years, his infirmities, and his
monstrous unwieldy person, she felt that a prince
is a prince for a' that, and a' that, and twice as
muckle's a' that. And the Orsini offer had,
accordingly, her consistent and unflinching
support.

As for the third proposals, perhaps it would
have been better to say nothing about them, were
it not for the paramount obligation to tell the
truth, and, as far as in him lies, the whole truth,
which is binding on whosoever presumes to
meddle with history. Be as angry as you will,
gentle reader, with the novelist who recounts to