Page:Val d'Arno (Ruskin, 1890).djvu/190

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158
VAL D'ARNO.

Ancients and proposed, as an enterprise worthy of Florentine generosity, the freedom of all the peoples who groaned under the tyranny of the Church. And Florence, Siena, Pisa, Lucca, and Arezzo,—all the great cities of Etruria, the root of religion in Italy,—joined against the tyranny of religion. Strangely, this Etrurian league is not now to restore Tarquin to Rome, but to drive the Roman Tarquin into exile. The story of Lucretia had been repeated in Perugia; but the Umbrian Lucretia had died, not by suicide, but by falling on the pavement from the window through which she tried to escape. And the Umbrian Sextus was the Abbot of Montemaggiore's nephew.

189. Florence raised her fleur-de-lys standard; and, in ten days, eighty cities of Romagna were free, out of the number of whose names I will read you only these—Urbino, Foligno, Spoleto, Narni, Camerino, Toscanella, Perugia, Orvieto.

And while the wind and the rain still beat the body of Manfred, by the shores of the Rio Verde, the body of Pope Urban was torn from its tomb, and not one stone of the carved work thereof left upon another.

190. I will only ask you to-day to notice