When Jacopone returned to Todi, he was fortified to combat with a recrudescence of desire for the luxurious habits of his youth and manhood. He was beset by a great necessity for distraction that he might not fail. He sold all his possessions and gave their price to the poor of Todi, left the city and avoided contact with his fellow-citizens and with anything that recalled the prosperous worldliness of his earlier years. He sought shelter in the mountains and forests, and in touch with nature began to reconstruct the fabric of his life. It is said that he drew up a rule which included recreation as well as religious exercises. Since he must renounce all human friendships, he made friends of the mountains, the groves, the rivers, and took them for the audience of his verse. To them he sang his 'lauds'; to them he danced; to them he poured out his longing for holiness, ridding himself in their sympathy of his sorrows and the remembrance of past years. In child-like gaiety he declared himself a child-born again. The fantasy went far towards his healing; and summers so spent, with seasons of wandering planned to give battle against himself, proved effectual in the end. As Prof. Brugnoli suggests, the artist in him inspired means for his own salvation.

With restored health he set himself to make detailed confession of his sins in lauds,' which, although they breathe horror of his guilt, contain no morbid exaggeration, but rather a supreme sincerity; and this sincerity is emphasised by his use of the Umbrian vernacular. He tells a plain unvarnished tale in the homely language of the people. So plain it is that sometimes it quits the region of poetry, and descends into mere rhyming narrative; but thence again it soars into allegory, spiritual fervour, mystical exaltation. Umbria and Tuscany were the homes of that form of poetry called 'Lauds'; and in Umbrian and Tuscan-Italian they were composed.

About eighteen years after Vanna's death Jacopone was received into the Franciscan order. He was a tertiary, and called himself one of God's minstrels, like Fra Pacifico, for years before he entered the convent at Pantanelli. He took the vows with a solemnity scarcely understood by the friars of that generation. In the split between the conventual friars and the faithful followers of St Francis -the brothers of hermitages and huts-Jacopone's mind

was wholly on the side of the latter, and his love of saintly poverty was only second to that of the Patriarch. There had been hesitancy on the part of the Guardian at Pantanelli about his reception. In order to propitiate the friars he had given them a Latin chant, Cur Mundus militat sub vana gloria,' and a 'laud' in the idiom of Todi upon the uncertainty of all earthly good; and the quality of these poems led them to admit him, expecting honour to their convent from his renown.

At first he was happy in strict obedience to authority; but his devout submission to asceticism, his poverty and humility, soon brought him into disfavour with the lax and self-indulgent friars. Their contempt of the rule grieved him to the quick; and a number of his 'lauds' were inspired by the pain he suffered. Ah!' he cried, 'I weep because Love is not loved.' In keen and dramatic satire he represented Poverty as going about the ways seeking in vain for recognition. Driven from their gates by prelates and monks, she hoped to be welcomed by the followers of Francis her spouse, but found them well clad and abundantly fed. They, too, scornfully refused her shelter; and she turned to the abodes of the sisters of poverty. But the portress bade her be gone; the abbess cried out with horror at her appearance, and bade the gardener chase her away with blows. Weeping, poor Poverty called aloud: 'Francis alone truly loved me.'

Jacopone wrote three beautiful 'lauds' on St Francis, which contain the whole theology of the order as he founded it. In 'O Francis, beloved of God,' we find set forth the saint's mission to defeat a second time the machinations of the devil. First, Christ humbled his power in the world; then Francis was sent by God to resist his lures and weaken his hold upon both Church and people. All three poems are explicit as to his place in God's plan; and Jacopone has always been associated with St Anthony of Padua and St Bonaventure as the third Franciscan theologian. Other poems were satires scourging the decadent friars, 'wolves in sheep's clothing' he called them, 'displeasing to God'; wounding Christ anew, persecuting His 'little flock.' For his efforts he received hatred and persecution at Pantanelli but, undiscouraged, maintained his single-handed crusade. His satires commended themselves to the Umbrian people,

and were sung on the roads and in the streets. They were written in rough dialect and vertebrated with peasant phrases and peasant wit, for the finer style which he employed for praise was laid aside in these satires in order that his invectives might appeal the better to the people. He called it his new madness' to abandon the classical style in which he had taken delight, the Ciceronian periods, the love-chants, and the sophistries of polished rhetoric, for plain speaking.

His hermit friend, Pier del Morrone, was made pope in July 1294 by the craft of Cardinal Gaetani, who chose him as a warming-pan for his own accession. Pier became Pope Celestine V, reigned foolishly for five months, and resigned at the peremptory dictation of Gaetani. Dante has too sternly meted out to him immortal discredit as the pope of the 'great refusal.' Jacopone, who knew his incapacity, sent him a satirical epistle on his election, and yet cherished a faint hope that he might attempt some reformation in the monastic orders. It was quenched by his grant of privileges, excessive in their character, to the order of Celestines on Mount Morrone. Jacopone advised him to resign, but was no better pleased with the election of Gaetani as Pope Boniface VIII.

This man had made himself the most famous jurisconsult of his time. After his training at Paris he went to Bologna for a time; and, as Jacopone was still there, it is probable that the old jealousy was renewed. He entered the Church, a man worldly, ambitious, crafty, loving power and promotion, and knowing how to attain them. He received benefice after benefice, in England, France, and Italy, one of the latter at Todi. He knew England well, and had been there in the suite of Cardinal Ottoboni, the Legate. He was useful to the Curia, and was made cardinal at the age of fifty-three, from which time he managed the Conclave to his own advantage. Of sanctity he recked nothing; of religion he knew little; but he understood the trade of pope, its power and its perquisites. On Christmas eve, 1294, he took his seat on the papal throne; but the curse of poor Pope Celestine troubled him: Thou shalt secure the papacy like a fox thou shalt die like a dog.' Hunted down and imprisoned by Boniface, Celestine died in the tower of Fumone in

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1296, and Boniface had the cynical audacity to prepare for his victim's beatification. In the same year he enraged the King of France by a Bull forbidding the French clergy to subsidise the royal revenue; on which Philip the Fair took the part of his enemies, and helped Sciarra Colonna with troops against him.

From the first, Jacopone sided with the Pope's foes. The poet had left Pantanelli and was in a convent near Preneste. He was a signatory to the protest against Boniface, drawn up at Palestrina by Cardinals Pietro and Jacopo Colonna, and his signature reads, 'Jacopo Benedetti da Todi.' For this Boniface summoned him to Rome, and then condemned him to imprisonment in a filthy pit of the convent on Mount Preneste, where the poor minstrel of God' was nearly suffocated. But he prayed and sang with redoubled energy, and defied his persecutor in a satirical poem. In this he describes jestingly the horrors of his prison—the foul air, the stale bread and water lowered to him, the rats which disputed his food, his chains rattling when he moved, his plank bed, and the darkness. But he called the world to witness that his foe was powerless to crush his triumphant spirit. Then the angry pontiff launched a Bull of excommunication against him. The act struck home into the old man's breast; for it was a binding dogma that a popeatheist though he might be, guilty of every deadly sincould wield the weapons of divine wrath. Jacopone tried to soften the hard heart; he entreated absolution and leave to return to the flock of Francis,' in vain. But the acute mind of Jacopo the notary soon came to his aid; and he knew that such a one as Boniface was powerless to snatch his soul from God. The pope was 'Lo falso clericato,' foe to the Church; and he wrote his laments on the Church degraded by such a lord.

It is said that, one day in 1299, Boniface came to see the ruins of Preneste and passed by Jacopone's dungeon. Looking down he called out mockingly, 'Well, Jacopone, when are you coming out?' and the old poet answered, 'When thou shalt come in.' Four years later the prediction was fulfilled; and when Boniface, made prisoner, died of shame and vexation, Jacopone was released, and absolved by Benedict XI. He returned to Pantanelli,

but only for a brief time, as he was directed to retire to Collazzone about twelve miles north-west of Todi.

He passed his native city on the way, and blessed it as St Francis had blessed Assisi. The journey was long, and he was worn by seven years of cruel imprisonment; so he rested a few days at the convent of the Vallombrosiani in Fontanellis, whence he walked to San Lorenzo at Collazzone. As he entered, he chanted, 'This is my rest; here have I desired to dwell.' And here he dwelt three years in peace and in a rapture of devotion, his most exalted poems being written at this period. The love of God, the love of Christ, were his themes; there was no more satire, no more morbid depreciation of life, of the senses, of the needs of 'Brother Body.' He recognised that sight, touch, hearing, and tasting are gifts from above; that the fragrance of fruit and flower, the glory of mountain and valley, the singing of birds and murmur of streams, the pleasant flavours of food and drink, the kindly touch of a friendly hand, were created by divine love and are eloquent of their Creator. Constant meditation on the love of God inspired him to write his 'Laud of the Five Gateways,' at which a man may meet these varied gifts of love. It was also during these last years that Jacopone composed his great Latin hymn, 'Stabat Mater Dolorosa,' the undying evidence of his power, since it has been fitted with music as immortal for the solemnity of the Mass. It is less well known that he wrote a second, the 'Stabat Mater Speciosa' of the manger-cradle, inspired by the memory of St Francis and the Presepio at Monte Colombo. It expresses Mary's wondering worship of the Babe of Bethlehem.

In December 1306 he lay dying in the hospital of San Lorenzo at Collazzone, worn out with suffering, perhaps with joy. On his pallet he sang his last praise of divine love. The friars had entreated him to receive the last sacraments, but he bade them wait, 'for,' said he, John of La Verna will come and he will administer them to me.' As he spoke two travelling friars sought admission; and one of them was his friend. The last offices were performed, and in a rapture of devout and radiant gratitude he sat up in bed and sang his swan-song:

'O Love Divine, Thy wounds,

With which Thou woundest me,