asleep. And in the meanwhile returned Gotard from the city, and when he came and joined him to Rocke sleeping he heard the voice of an angel saying: 'O Rocke, friend of God, Our Lord hath heard thy prayers; lo, thou art delivered from the pestilence, and art made all whole, and Our Lord commandeth that thou take thy way to thine own country.' With this sudden voice Gotard was astonished, which never tofore knew the name of Rocke. And anon Rocke awoke, and felt himself all whole by the grace of God, like as the angel said. And Gotard told unto Rocke how he had heard the angel and what he had said. Then S. Rocke prayed Gotard that he should keep his name secret and to tell it to no man, for he desired no worldly glory. Then after a few days S. Rocke with Gotard and his fellows abode in the desert, and informed them all in godly works, and they then began to wax holy, wherein he exhorted them and confirmed, and left them in that desert valley."

Whatever else one does while at Piacenza, one should not omit to visit that most famous shrine of a great British or rather Irish saint at the old and splendid Abbey of Bobbio.

It is a long and a hard journey. Nevertheless, it should be attempted. The only way to do the whole journey in a single day is by carriage, for Bobbio lies at the end of a difficult road, some thirty-two miles to the south of Piacenza in the mountains. It is true that you may go ten miles, as far as Grazzano, by steam tram, and from there to Rivergaro, another five miles, by a little train, but at Rivergaro you will not get so fine a carriage as at Piacenza, and you have still more than seventeen miles to go.

But what, the reader may ask, is Bobbio, and why should one go there? After all, the British Isles are full of the forgotten shrines of early British saints and

no one marks them; indeed, these same early British saints are more utterly neglected and forgotten than any other sort of beings. All the same, if you care anything for holiness, if you care at all for great achievement, if you have any reverence for learning and the old great masters of letters, you must go to Bobbio, for there S. Columban had his home and thence "all the palimpsests known in the world have emerged." 1 I wish in three words I could make known to you this Irishman who was as it were S. Benedict and S. Francis and S. Bernard all in one. I wish in three hundred words, or even in three thousand, I could tell you the man he was, and the great Abbot and leader, and above all the great Saint. I know I can do none of these things, and I fear that even the boldest adventurer who lingers in Piacenza will, for all I can say, refuse to go to Bobbio in the woods of the upper valley of the Trebbia. Yet I will do my best.

S. Columban was born at Leinster in 543, the very year that S. Benedict died at Monte Cassino. He was as a young man beautiful and studious, and the first led him into grave temptation, for his countrywomen also were very fair, and they loved him; but his study saved him, for when he saw he had entered into temptation he gave himself wholly to such things as grammar and rhetoric and geometry; and even so at last he fled away. On the advice of an aged woman he went first to Bangor by the sea, and then in 585, when he was forty-two years old, he set out for Gaul, where he came into Burgundy. There the king received him graciously, but he sought the mountains, the Vosges. Columban loved solitude and all dumb things birds would come to him and perch on his shoulder that he might caress them, and in the forest even the squirrels would come to him and nestle in his

1 We owe to it, for instance, the De Republica of Cicero, and the works and letters of Cornelius Fronto.

cowl; a bear is said to have resigned its cave to him. Such a man was not long without disciples, and when they grew in numbers he founded monasteries at Annegray, at Fontaines and at Luxeuil, where he instituted the hard rule known as the Irish Rule; yet he was full of sweetness to all, and called his monks "my sweet sons," my pupils," my very brothers," and himself "sinner." His hard words he kept for the wicked, among them the young King of Burgundy, who presently sent him into exile. His journey soon became a triumphal progress, and after preaching to the heathen on the banks of the Rhine, with S. Gall, he passed through Switzerland, where he left his friend, into Italy. There Agilulf, King of the Lombards, welcomed him, as did Theodolinda his wife, and he at once set himself to fight that very pestilent blight of Arianism which at that time lay on all Cisalpine Gaul. In the mountains as in Burgundy, he founded his house, at Bobbio, in the valley of the Trebbia, to be his citadel against heresy. That was in 612. He himself lived in a cave near a chapel he had built to the Blessed Virgin, but he founded a church and monastery on the other side of the river, which though ruined remains to this day. Yet he was but three years at Bobbio, for he died in 615.

That Bobbio which he had founded became the most famous and the most intellectual of the monasteries of Italy: it was the hope of the seventh century, and may be said to have achieved as much in the salvation of Europe as any other place whatsoever. When that was accomplished in the eleventh century it began to decline, later its precious library was distributed, and in the seventeenth century it was but a shadow of itself.

The church which S. Columban founded stands in the upper part of what is to-day the town of Bobbio. It is an interesting building, but its chief treasure

is on the altar in the crypt, where in a curious shrine the bones of the great Irishman await the last great trumpet. The huge monastery, in ruin, is desecrated, only the church remains, and, in the town, the Duomo, with its vast Lombard nave and aisles as low as those of S. Columban are lofty. Yet Bobbio is a place to linger in, to remember our Saint, and to search out the mountains as he did, and stray about the woods, where the dawn is all yours and the sunset and the night, and where one day telleth another of the ancient glory of God.

CHAPTER XVII

THE ÆMILIAN WAY

PIACENZmilia which the consul Emilius Lepidus

IACENZA, as I have said, was the terminus of the

built between Ariminum and Placentia in 187 B.C. The distance between these two cities was 180 miles, and the road thus constructed, and based upon the Flaminian Way which joined Rimini with Rome, became the means of civilisation for the whole plain. So great indeed was its influence that in time the vast province which it traversed and fed came to be known as Æmilia, and that name, which was in popular use long before it became officially recognised, has in one way or another persisted till to-day, when the new Italy has officially revived it and merged again into one province those parts of old Æmilia which for so many centuries were known as the Duchies of Parma and Modena, and the province of Romagna.

It is not my intention to deal in this book with the whole of this new province, for the Romagna with Bologna as its capital no longer makes a true part of Cisalpine Gaul, as it once did. Crushed between the Veneto on the north and Tuscany on the south, for many ages in the hands of the Church, the Romagna runs rather with that part of Italy which we call the Marches, and it is with them that I intend to treat of it. Nor is such a division by any means arbitrary or even modern. It has always appeared in the mind of the historians, and even of the administrators of this country. Strabo