His wife, palmed off upon the representative of an ancient and noble house, is the child of a nameless father and a common harlot of Rome; she is repelled by his person; and her cold submission to what she has been instructed in by the Archbishop as the duties of a wife is more intolerable than her earlier remoter aversion.

He is cheated of the dowry which lured him to marriage.

He is pointed at with smiling scorn by the gossips of Arezzo.

A gallant of the troop of Satan might have devised and executed some splendid revenge; but Guido is ever among the sutlers and camp-followers of the fiend, who are base before they are bold.

When he makes his final pleading for life in the cell of the New Prison by Castle Angelo, the animal cry, like that of a wild cat on whom the teeth of the trap have closed, is rendered shrill by the intensity of imagination with which he pictures to himself the apparatus of the scaffold and the hideous circumstance of his death.