blue cloth, with a scarlet sash. On Palm-Sunday, when we were at Solmona, the female costume was perfectly magnificent, the women wearing red cloth over their white panni, and a profusion of gold and coral ornaments. In preparation for Holy Week, immense coloured rosaries of sugar were selling, gaily decorated with feathers and ribbons, and thus religion was sweetened, as people were to suck off a sugarplum for every prayer they said.

We had a steep and exhausting walk up to the wild mountain cell where Cœlestine V. lived as the hermit Pietro Murrone from 1239 to 1294, and we could not but pity the archbishop and bishops, who in a time of even worse or no foot-paths scrambled up thither to announce his strange election to the Papacy, and carry him off, more like a frightened wild beast than a human being, to his splendid coronation at Aquila. No transition has ever been more extraordinary.

"Suddenly a solitary monk was summoned from his cell, in the remote Abruzzi, to ascend the Pontifical throne. The Cardinal of Ostia, Latino Malebranca, had admired the severe and ascetic virtues of Peter Murrone, a man of humble birth, but already, from his extraordinary austerities, held by the people as a man of the highest sanctity. He had retired from desert to desert, and still multitudes had tracked him out in vast swarms, some to wonder at, some to join his devout seclusion. He seemed to rival, if not to outdo, the famous anchorites of old. His dress was hair-cloth, with an iron cuirass; his food bread and water, with a few herbs on Sunday.

"Peter Murrone has left an account of his own youth. The brothers of his Order, who took his name, the Cœlestinians, vouched for its authenticity. His mother was devoutly ambitious that one of her eleven children should be dedicated to God. Many of them died, but Peter fulfilled her most ardent desires. His infancy was marked with miracles. In his youth he had learned to read the Psalter; he then knew not the person of the Blessed Virgin, nor of St. John. One day they descended bodily from a picture of the Crucifixion, stood before him, and sweetly

chaunted portions of the Psalter. At the age of twenty he went into the desert: visions of Angels were ever round him, sometimes showering roses over him. God showed him a great stone, under which he dug a hole, in which he could neither stand upright, nor stretch his limbs, and there he dwelt in all the luxury of self-torture among lizards, serpents, and toads. A bell in the heavens constantly sounded to summon him to prayers. He was offered a cock, he accepted the ill-omened gift; for his want of faith the bell was thenceforth silent. He was encircled by a crowd of followers, whom he had already formed into a kind of Order or Brotherhood; they were rude illiterate peasants from the neighbouring mountains.

"Either designedly or accidentally the Cardinal Malebranca spoke of the wonderful virtues of the hermit, Peter Murrone: the weary Conclave listened with interest. It was in that perplexed and exhausted state, when men seize desperately on any strange counsel to extricate themselves from their difficulty. . . . Peter Murrone was declared supreme Pontiff by unanimous acclamation.

"The place of Murrone's retreat was a cave in a wild mountain above the pleasant valley of Solmona. The ambassadors of the Conclave having achieved their journey from Perugia, with difficulty found guides to conduct them to the solitude. As they toiled up the rugged ascent, they were overtaken by the Cardinal Peter Colonna who had followed them without commission from the rest. The cave, in which the saint could neither sit upright nor stretch himself out, had a grated window with iron bars, through which he uttered his oracular responses to the wondering people. None even of the brethren of the Order might penetrate into the dark sanctuary of his austerities. The ambassadors of the Conclave found an old man with a long shaggy beard, sunken eyes overhung with heavy brows, and lids swollen with perpetual weeping, pale hollow cheeks, and limbs meagre with fasting: they fell on their knees before him, and he before them.

"So Peter Murrone the Hermit saw before him, in submissive attitudes, the three prelates, attended by the official notaries, who announced his election to the Papacy. He thought it was a dream, and for once assuredly there was a profound and religious reluctance to accept the highest dignity in the world. He protested with tears his utter inability to cope with affairs, to administer the sacred trust, to become the successor of the Apostle. The news spread abroad; the neighbouring people came hurrying by thousands, delighted that they were to have a saint, and their own saint, for a Pope. The hermit in vain tried to escape; he was brought back with respectful force, guarded with reverential vigilance. Nor was it the common people only

who were thus moved. The King of Naples, accompanied by his son, now in right of his wife entitled King of Hungary, hastened to do honour to his holy subject, to persuade the hermit, who perhaps would be dazzled by royal flatteries into a useful ally, to accept the proffered dignity. The hermit-pope was conducted from his lowly cave to the monastery of Santo Spirito, at the foot of the mountain. He still refused to be invested in the pontifical robes. At length arrived the Cardinal Malebranca: his age, dignity, character, and his language urging the awful responsibility which Peter Murrone would incur by resisting the manifest will of God, and by keeping the Popedom longer vacant (for all of which he would be called to give account on the day of judgment), prevailed over the awe-struck saint. Not the least earnest in pressing him to assume at once the throne were his rude but not so unambitious hermit brethren: they too looked for advancement, they followed him in crowds wherever he went."-Milman's Hist. of Latin Christianity.

The mountain is savage to a degree, and its pathlets are

guarded by huge sheep-dogs, against which stones are the only protection. Shepherds sit contentedly to see you devoured, and play prettily on their reed-pipes as in classical times. "Will you come up and show us your pipe," we said to a boy in rags who was sitting on a rock beneath us. Certainly not," he answered, with true mountain independence, "if you want to see it, you can come down to me."

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The original cell of Pietro Murrone is a cave, but, above it, a hermitage in two stories has been built long ago and is adorned with rude frescoes. A sort of brotherhood of hermitmonks was established here, and here "the blessed Roberto de Salie" died in the odour of sanctity, having first been favoured with a vision of the soul of Coelestine in bliss.

We could not but wonder if Cœlestine was at all like the poor hermit, the last of the brotherhood-who still lingers here utterly filthy-absolutely ignorant-coarse, and uncivilized. Yet with a sort of rude courtesy he offered us the poor hospitality of his smoke-blackened den. have an egg boiled or fried—a little black bread, not such as Signori like, Ah no! dunque io gli raccomando a la carità di Dio."

"Would we

Beneath the hermitage is the great monastery founded in honour of S. Pietro Celestino, rather like the Escurial in its proportions and situation. It is ghastly ugly. Under the Papal Government it was a hospital and orphanage. The present Government have turned out the children and made it a prison. The church has a picture of Coelestine by Raphael Mengs. Built into a small chapel above the convent, are a few Roman fragments from Corfinium.

It is said that Rienzi, the last of the Tribunes, lived here in retreat as a monk, when he fled from Rome, but the her

mitage of S. Spirito in the Maiella is also pointed out as the

place where he lived "come fraticello, con romiti e persone di penitenza."

(An excursion may be made (14 miles) from Solmona to the Lago di Scanno, but it must be performed partly on horseback and partly on foot, and in winter it is impossible from

VOL. II.

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