"An oath," he continued, not heeding this interruption, "which I exact from you in the name of friendship, in the name of virtue, in the name of liberty. Is it not generous, this offer of Pepoli—of him who has been the champion of the citizen against the student—the most popular man in all Bologna,—is it not generous that he should step forward to rescue my life from the blind rage and mad injustice of the multitude? But you must understand there is a certain price to be given for this generosity. You do not expect him to sacrifice his popularity, which is his power, out of mere compassion to one who has never courted nor applauded him, without receiving, in return, some compensation. If you accept his benefits, you must forward his counsels, you must promote his designs. Say, will you swear?"
"Yes! yes! we swear!" was the general response.
"Students of Bologna!" he proceeded, elevating his voice. "I accept this mark of your friendship. For my sake you have promised to swear. Now hear the oath I propose, and to which I bind you. This man offers me my life, and the price of it is—the liberty of Bologna! Fellow students, Romeo de' Pepoli aims at the tyranny. Swear that you will never, on any condition, for any boon, aid him in his flagitious enterprise; that you will thwart, and resist, and combat it to the utmost. Swear that you will, at all times, reject his mediation—as I now reject, utterly and with scorn, the service that he proffers me. I unmask him to you ere I die. I, too, have lived for one good purpose. This man, my friends, would be tyrant of Bologna—swear, to me that he shall not!"
There was a pause of a few seconds. But it was soon evident that the noble spirit—of patriotism and of self-sacrifice—of their admired friend, had found a genuine response in all his hearers. He had touched the true chord. Carried forward by his disinterested enthusiasm, and pledged by the promise he, had somewhat artfully extorted from them, they rose, and with one voice repeated the oath proposed to, them. Pepoli, pale and aghast, and utterly confounded, and catching here and there the flashing of the half-drawn steel, made a precipitate retreat. Of all the assembly, Petrarch alone remained silent—he alone failed, or forgot, to take the oath;—full of concern for the safety of his noble friend, full of admiration for his greatness, he fell weeping upon his neck.
CONCLUSION.
After this, there was no more hope for the prisoner. If to the anger of the Bolognese was added the determined enmity of Romeo de' Pepoli, now resolved on his destruction, from what quarter could a ray of hope proceed? He was even now removed—such was the influence which the new enemy he had provoked possessed over the Podestà—to the common prison, and treated in all respects like a condemned malefactor. The university pleaded its privilege to judge a member of their own body, but the angry feeling of the citizens would not permit them for a moment to listen to this plea. There, was no power on earth to save him—and his fault was so light! A man more honourable did not exist. The purity of Constantia was more safe in his hands than in any others—he loved her so well.
We are not sufficiently in the "tragic vein" to follow the prisoner through the last hours of his confinement, and of his existence. To be struck dead in the flush of life, with all his passions in full bloom upon him, was a hard decree. Sometimes he protested vehemently against the palpable injustice and cruelty of his sentence; but, in general, he found his consolation in the mournful sentiment, that had he lived, he should have been miserable—for the great desire of his life was doomed to be thwarted. "I told you," he said one day to his friend Petrarch, "that this love would work my destruction. It has so; but its great misery has made destruction itself indifferent."
We willingly draw a veil over the last fatal scene, and all the horrors that precede a public death. Throughout this scene his courage never forsook him; but flashes of uncontrollable indignation would occasionally break from him, and occasionally a sigh of more tender despondency would escape. The last tear he shed, the last complaint he murmured, was still to the coldness of Constantia: "We should have been so happy, had she loved—and now!—"
History records that the execution of Giacomo, as well by infringing the supposed privileges of the university as by the indignation it excited in the large circle of his friends and companions, nearly led to the withdrawal of the university from the town of Bologna. The students and the professors seceded in a mass, and retired to Sienna. No entreaties could bring them back; the glory of Bologna might have been extinguished for ever. The Podestà and other magistrates of the town were compelled at length to send a solemn deputation. They promised, in future, to respect their privileges; and, by raising the salaries of the professors, and some other popular measures, they eventually prevailed upon them to return.
Petrarch had not left the city with the rest—he had lingered behind to perform the last rites and honours to the remains of Giacomo—to raise the tomb and inscribe it with his verse.