Here was the persecuting Bishop,
Paul IV.'s ally against the Spaniards, painted by Caravaggio in hauberk
and mailed gloves, with his motto--Etiam cum gladio--surmounting the
episcopal chair; there the Duke who, after a life of hard warfare and
stern piety, had resigned his office to his son and died in the
"angelica vestis" of the tertiary order; and the "beatified" Duchess who
had sold her jewels to buy corn for the poor during the famine of 1670,
and had worn a hair-shirt under a corset that seemed stiff enough to
serve all the purposes of bodily mortification. So the file descended,
the colours fading, the shadows deepening, till it reached a baby
porporato of the last century, who had donned the cardinal's habit at
four, and stood rigid and a little pale in his red robes and lace, with
a crucifix and a skull on the table to which the top of his berretta
hardly reached.
It seemed to Odo as he gazed on the long line of faces as though their
owners had entered one by one into a narrowing defile, where the sun
rose later and set earlier on each successive traveller; and in every
countenance, from that of the first Duke to that of his own peruked and
cuirassed grandfather, he discerned the same symptom of decadency: that
duality of will which, in a delicately-tempered race, is the fatal fruit
of an undisturbed pre-eminence. They had ruled too long and enjoyed too
much; and the poor creature he had just left to his dismal scruples and
forebodings seemed the mere empty husk of long-exhausted passions.
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