the consideration of it are so coloured and fashioned by their recollections of that superlatively lovely face and the ineffable expression of its lineaments, that it is well to remove this stumbling-block out of the way before attempting to lay the truth of the story before them. Well, there is the picture hanging on the wall of the Barberini Gallery, catalogued as a portrait of Beatrice Cenci by Guido Reni. The custode says it, and the guide-books allow it. And it never occurs to any of the thousands of sightseers who gaze on it, and still less to any of the hundreds who order copies of it, to doubt the accuracy of the description. The unlucky fact, however, is that the picture was never intended to represent the bella peccatrice at all, and was in truth painted long after her tragical death. Signor Bertolotti is enabled, by a careful examination of the records of the Pontifical Treasury, to state as a matter of fact that Guido never painted in Rome before the death of Beatrice in 1599. The date of the first payment made to him is 1608. Further, we have a catalogue of the Barberini pictures made in 1604, and again in 1623; and in neither of these is there any mention of any portrait of Beatrice Cenci, or of any work by Guido Reni. As Signor Bertolotti remarks, 'this inventory having been made five years after the death of 'Beatrice, with a notice of the subjects and the persons repre'sented in the pictures, it is not credible that the Cenci, the memory of whom must then have been fresh in the minds ' of all men, should have been overlooked.' Signor Bertolotti inclines to believe that this celebrated canvas really is a Madonna by Paolo Veronese. Signor Bertolotti, excellent as an historical investigator, is not on his own ground as a connoisseur. He shows quite satisfactorily that Guido never could have painted a portrait of the Cenci, but wanders altogether ultra crepidam as regards his alternative suggestions. It certainly is not intended to represent the Madonna. The picture was undoubtedly painted by no hand save that of Guido Reni; and anyone who hesitates to accept his own artistic appreciation as sufficient evidence of the fact may find the means of convincing himself by a visit to the chapel attached to the church of St. Gregory on the slope of the hill beyond the Coliseum, where, in the large fresco which Guido painted there in rivalry with that by Domenichino on the opposite wall, he will recognise the well-known face, head-dress, and drapery in one of the figures looking

These catalogues may be found printed in the 'Giornale di 'Erudizione Artistica,' vol. v. p. 278. Perugia: 1876.

VOL. CXLIX. NO. CCCV.

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at St. Andrew. This figure is at once seen to be, not like, but the same. Further, he may see in a picture by Guido in the Orsini palace a reproduction of the same favourite model. Again, at the Rospigliosi palace the same head, very slightly modified, may be seen in one of Guido's Muses. In short, the head in question was, without doubt, that of a favourite, but most probably somewhat idealised, model of the painter, which he painted at Rome; and it came into the possession of the Barberini, not only after the death of Beatrice, but after the printing of the catalogues which have been referred to. The tradition connecting the picture with the Cenci, altogether gratuitous, but particularly well serving the purposes of the Barberini custode and of the Roman copyists, pretends that the picture was painted on the day previous to the execution of Beatrice. But, as Signor Bertolotti remarks, Beatrice, at that time more than twenty years old, haggard from remorse, and lacerated by the torture, could not have presented that youthful and serene countenance which we admire in the 'picture.' The Barberini-Heaven knows why-grant only with extreme difficulty and rarity the permission to make a real copy of this picture. Hence the vast majority of the copies sold year by year in Rome are copies of copies, it is impossible to say how many degrees removed from the original copy which has been the parent of them.

So much for the celebrated Barberini picture.

But the tragedy-the terrible story which has been told from generation to generation through all these centuries! That, surely, is not wholly a myth? No! A terrible tragedy was enacted in the last two years of the sixteenth century, and the veritable history of it is shocking enough; though, as we are about to show, it is not marked by those circumstances of enormity and horror which have stamped it with the blackest mark in the records of depravity and crime. What these circumstances of enormity were, it is unnecessary to recapitulate here. The tale, as it has been told by dozens of novelists, poets, and pretended historians, is sufficiently well known. We shall content ourselves, therefore, with narrating the events as they really happened. Even thus stripped of its adventitious character, it is startling and terrible, and eminently illustrative of society and manners in the Eternal City at the end of the sixteenth century.

Clement VIII., a Florentine of the great Aldobrandini family, was sitting on the Papal throne. He was the stronghanded Pontiff who compelled Henry IV. of France to sue for a pardon and reconciliation long denied to him. He

was elected in 1592, and reigned thirteen years, dying in 1605. St. Peter's bark, having shot the rapids of the Council of Trent with less damage to the craft than might have been expected, had now come into comparatively tranquil water. It was no longer a Church militant. What it had lost in the great struggle of the preceding century was lost definitively. What it had retained it was in no danger of losing within any time to which the shrewdest of human eyes could then look forward. The Popes ruled their own' after the fashion which seemed good to them. It was the beginning of the long sleepy good old' time which lasted for some two hundred years; and the Roman city and society were such as the unchecked and unmitigated influences of a theocracy made them.

In 1556 Monsignor Cristoforo Cenci became treasurergeneral of the Apostolic Chamber. That place seems to have been in many respects analogous to that of the fermiers généraux under the later Bourbon Kings of France. It was quite according to the normal condition of such matters at Rome that the holder of the position in question should be a consummate scoundrel, and should accumulate an enormous fortune. Christopher Cenci was true to the traditions of his office in both respects. He was not a priest, but a 'chierico,' a clerk; i.e. he had received holy orders in such a degree as to mark him indelibly as the Church's own, but not in such a degree as to enable him to say mass, or bind him to perpetual celibacy. Without holy orders of at least such an inferior degree, no man could aspire to any of the lucrative offices of the Apostolic Court. Although not in such orders as to enable him to say mass, Christopher Cenci nevertheless held the benefice of the parish of St. Thomas, in which the Cenci mansion stood and still stands, adding the proceeds of it to the annually increasing wealth he accumulated. He might have married; but he preferred living in concubinage with a married woman, named Beatrice Arias, by whom he had a son, Francesco, during the lifetime of the husband of Beatrice. After the death, however, of this husband, he legitimatised his son; left him heir to all his enormous wealth; married Beatrice on his death-bed; left her a life-rent and a house, in the hope that she would live honestè et castè; and died about the middle of the year 1562. On November 20, 1563, she married her second husband's man of business, one Evangelista Recchia. But during her short widowhood she was accused by her son's tutor of stealing out of his room in Casa Cenci certain clerical robes. Signor Bertolotti gives the

very damaging evidence of certain servants of the house respecting this accusation; and very curious, as illustrations or social conditions, they are. But want of space forbids the reproduction of them here.

Of Francesco Cenci Signor Bertolotti begins his account thus: The bastard of a half priest who had abused his office to enrich himself, and of a woman who, faithless to her own husband, was accused of theft, and suspected of having been unfaithful also to her lover, seemed predestinated to be a ' worthless man.' He was born, not, as Steudhal in his wellknown work, Les Cenci,' says, in 1527, but in 1549, and from a very early age showed that, whether predestined or not, his career was likely to be a stormy one. His first appearance in a criminal court was at eleven years of age, the accusation against him being that he, assisted by his tutor, had beaten, usque ad sanguinem, one Quintilio di Vetralla. His father settled the matter for him by paying handsomely. In his twelfth year he was by a formal legal act emancipated from his father's authority. In the following year his father Christopher died; and we find that the youthful heir paid 33,000 crowns to various public administrations to compromise sundry actions for maladministration brought against his father's estate. Among the rest he paid 3,800 crowns to the Chapter of St. Peter's, whence we see that the old treasurer held various offices of trust, which he seems to have impartially abused.

In his fourteenth year Francesco was again in trouble about a child of which he had become the father by a young girl. And on October 24, 1563, he was betrothed to Ersilia, daughter of the late Valerio Santa Croce, the dower (promised by the bride's uncle, Monsignore Prospero Santa Croce, a bishop) being 5,000 crowns. Some of the narrators of the Cenci story have accused Francesco of having poisoned this Ersilia, but there never was any foundation for the accusation. She died a natural death after twenty-one years of married life, and after having given birth to twelve children, of whom five died in their infancy. Nevertheless, there is abundant evidence that the marriage was not a happy one, and that Ersilia Santa Croce suffered much from her brutal husband. She died in 1584, when her husband was in his thirty-sixth year, leaving behind her five sons, Giacomo, Cristoforo, Rocco, Bernardo, and Paolo; and two daughters, Antonina and Beatrice. Giacomo died on the scaffold on September 10, 1599. Cristoforo was murdered by one Paolo Bruno Corso, his rival in the affections of a woman of the town. Rocco was killed in a

duel by an illegitimate son of the Count of Pitigliano (Orsini) in the year 1595. Bernardo lived till July, 1627, died a natural death, and left two sons and four daughters. Paolo, the youngest, appears to have been sickly from his childhood. He died probably in 1600, as it should seem of consumption. Antonina, the eldest daughter of Francesco Cenci, was born in 1573, as appears from the statement that she was twentytwo at the date of the contract of marriage between her and Luzio Savelli, on January 18, 1595. The exact date of her death is not known; but she did not live long, and she left no offspring. Her husband, Luzio (or, as we should write, Lucius) Savelli, was a member of one of the noblest families in Rome. And the same may be said of Ersilia Santa Croce, the first wife of Francesco Cenci.

Now Francesco was, at the time of his marriage with this highborn and noble Roman lady, a wretch notorious for wickedness, brutality, and abominations of every sort, who had been already publicly disgraced by appearing as a prisoner in court at the instance of the public prosecutor. But he was enormously wealthy, and had therefore no difficulty in obtaining the hand of one of the noblest ladies in Rome. When his daughter was married to the noble Savelli, he was to an infinitely greater extent a disgraced man, as will be further seen in the following pages― seen, that is, to a certain very imperfect degree by reason of the impossibility of printing on a page destined for general circulation the entire details of his atrocities. But he gave his daughter Antonina a dower of 20,000 crowns, and one of the proudest families in Rome was willing to make the alliance -facts which may be recommended to the attention of those laudatores temporis acti who are fond of pointing to scandals of a similar, though hardly equal, kind in our own day, as indications of the degeneracy of noble and generous sentiment.

We come now to Beatrice, the second and youngest daughter of Francesco Cenci, the heroine of the popular story. All the narrators of it are unanimous in declaring that she was of exquisite beauty (is not there the portrait to testify it?); that she was beloved by a certain Monsignore Mario Guerra, and was waiting for an union with him till he could obtain the Pope's dispensation from the orders he had received; and that she was at the time of her tragic death just sixteen. Only a few weeks have passed, says Signor Bertolotti, writing in 1877, since the register of her birth was discovered in the archives of the church of San Lorenzo in Damaso. The document runs thus:- On the 12th of February, 1577, Beatrice, daughter of Francesco Cenci, and of Ersilia, his wife, in the