no less a Buondelmonte than the worthy and very magnificent Messer Ippolito Buondelmonte! Messer Ippolito, I kiss your hands; I am very much your humble servant and thief-taker. By my faith, this will be fine news for to-morrow."

To-morrow was indeed a heavy day to all the Buondelmonti, and as merry a one to all the Bardi, except poor Dianora. She knew not what had prevented Ippolito from finishing his ascent up the ladder; some interruption it must have been; but of what nature she could not determine, nor why he had not resumed his endeavours. It could have been nothing common. Was he known? Was she known? Was it all known? And the poor girl tormented herself with a thousand fears. Madonna Lucrezia hastened to her the first thing in the morning, with a full, true, and particular account. Ippolito de' Buondelmonti had been seized, in coming down a rope-ladder from one of the front windows of the house, with a great drawn sword in one hand and a box of jewels in the other. Dianora saw the whole truth in a moment, and from excess of sorrow, gratitude, and love, fainted away. Madonna Lucrezia guessed the truth too, but was almost afraid to confess it to her own mind, much more to speak of it aloud; and had not the news, and the bustle, and her niece's fainting, furnished her with something to do, she could have fainted herself very heartily, out of pure consternation. Gossip Veronica was in a worse condition when the news reached her; and Ippolito's mother, who guessed but too truly as well as the others, was seized with an illness, which joining with the natural weakness of her constitution, threw her into a stupor, and prevented her from attending to any thing. The next step of Madonna Lucrezia, after seeing Dianora out of her fainting fit, and giving the household to understand that the story of the robber had alarmed her, was to go to Gossip Veronica and concert measures of

concealment. The two women wept very sincerely for the poor youth, and admired his heroism in saving his mistress's honour; but with all their good-nature, they agreed that he was quite in the right, and that it would be but just to his magnanimity, and to their poor dear Dianora, to keep the secret as closely. Madonna Lucrezia then returned home, to be near Dianora, and help to baffle enquiry; while Gossip Veronica kept close in doors, too ill to see visitors, and alternately praying to the saint her namesake, and taking reasonable draughts of Montepulciano.

In those days there were too many wild young men of desperate fortunes to render Ippolito's confession improbable. Besides, he had been observed of late to be always without money; reports of his being addicted to gambling had arisen; and his father was avaricious. Lastly, his groaning in the church was remembered, under pretence of pity; and the magistrate (who was of the hostile party) concluded, with much sorrow, that he must have more sins to answer for than they knew of, which in so young a man was deplorable. The old gentleman had too much reason to know, that in elder persons it would have been nothing remarkable.

Ippolito, with a grief of heart which only served to confirm the bye-standers in their sense of his guilt, waited in expectation of his sentence. He thought it would be banishment, and was casting in his mind how he could hope some day or other to get a sight of his mistress, when the word Death fell on him like a thunderbolt. The origin of a sentence so severe was but too plain to every body; but the Bardi were uppermost that day; and the city, exhausted by some late party excesses, had but too much need of repose. Still it was thought a dangerous trial of the public pulse. The pity felt for the tender age of Ippolito was increased by the anguish which he found himself unable to repress. "Good

"God!” cried he, "must I die so young? And must I never "see-must I never see the light again, and Florence, and "my dear friends?" And he fell into almost abject intreaties to be spared; for he thought of Dianora. But the byestanders fancied that he was merely afraid of death; and by the help of suggestions from the Bardi partisans, their pity almost turned into contempt. He prostrated himself at the magistrate's feet; he kissed his knees; he disgusted his own father; till finding every thing against him, and smitten at once with a sense of his cowardly appearance and the necessity of keeping his mistress's honour inviolable, he declared his readiness to die like a man, and at the same time stood wringing his hands, and weeping like an infant. He was sentenced to die next day.

The Standard of Jus

The day came. The hour came. tice was hoisted before the door of the tribunal, and the trumpet blew through the city, announcing the death of a criminal. Dianora, to whom the news had been gradually broken, heard it in her chamber, and would have burst forth and proclaimed the secret but for Madonna Lucrezia, who spoke of her father, and mother, and all the Bardi, and the inutility of attempting to save one of the opposite faction, and the dreadful consequences to every body if the secret were betrayed. Dianora heard little about every body; but the habit of respecting her father and mother, and dreading their reproaches, kept her, moment after moment, from doing anything but listen and look pale; and, in the meantime, the procession began moving towards the scaffold.

Ippolito issued forth from the prison, looking more like a young martyr than a criminal. He was now perfectly quiet, and a sort of unnatural glow had risen into his cheeks, the result of the enthusiasm and conscious self-sacrifice into which

he had worked himself during the night. He had only

prayed, as a last favour, that he might be taken through the street in which the house of the Bardi stood; for he had lived, he said, as every body knew, in great hostility with that family, and he now felt none any longer, and wished to bless the house as he passed it. The magistrate, for more reasons than one, had no objection; the old confessor, with tears in his eyes, said that the dear boy would still be an honour to his family, as surely as he would be a saint in heaven; and the procession moved on. The main feeling of the crowd, as usual, was that of curiosity, but there were few, indeed, in whom it was not mixed with pity; and many females found the sight so intolerable, that they were seen coming away down the streets, weeping bitterly, and unable to answer the questions of those they met.

The procession now began to pass the house of the Bardi. Ippolito's face, for an instant, turned of a chalky whiteness, and then resumed its colour. His lips trembled, his eyes filled with tears; and thinking his mistress might possibly be at the window, taking a last look of the lover that died for her, he bowed his head gently, at the same time forcing a smile, which glittered through his watery eyes. At that instant the trumpet blew its dreary blast for the second time. Dianora had already risen on her couch, listening, and asking what noise it was that approached. Her aunt endeavoured to quiet her with her excuses; but this last noise aroused her beyond controul; and the good old lady, forgetting herself in the condition of the two lovers, no longer attempted to stop her. "Go," said she, "in God's name, my child, "and Heaven be with you."

Dianora, her hair streaming, her eye without a tear, her cheek on fire, burst, to the astonishment of her kindred, into the room where they were all standing. She tore them aside from one of the windows with a preternatural strength, and,

stretching forth her head and hands, like one inspired, cried out, "Stop! stop! it is my Ippolito! my husband!" And, so saying, she actually made a movement as if she would have stepped to him out of the window; for every thing but his image faded from her eyes. A movement of confusion took place among the multitude. Ippolito stood rapt on the sudden, trembling, weeping, and stretching his hands towards the window, as if praying to his guardian angel. The kinsmen would have prevented her from doing any thing further; but, as if all the gentleness of her character was gone, she broke from them with violence and contempt, and rushing down stairs into the street, exclaimed, in a frantic manner,

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People! Dear God! Countrymen! I am a Bardi; he is a "Buondelmonte; he loved me; and that is the whole crime!" and, at these last words, they were locked in each other's

arms.

The populace now broke through all restraint. They stopped the procession; they bore Ippolito back again to the seat of the magistracy, carrying Dianora with him; they described in a peremptory manner the mistake; they sent for the heads of the two houses; they made them swear a treaty of peace, amity, and unity; and in half an hour after the lover had been on the road to his death, he set out upon it again, the acknowledged bridegroom of the beautiful creature by his side.

Never was such a sudden revulsion of feeling given to a whole city. The women who had retreated in anguish, came back the gayest of the gay. Every body plucked all the myrtles they could find, to put into the hands of those who made the former procession, and who now formed a singular one for a bridal; but all the young women fell in with their white veils; and instead of the funeral dirge, a song of thanksgiving was chaunted. The very excess of their sensations enabled