ABSTRACT
PRUDENT care must be taken, none the less, that, when princes and noblemen are to be carried to the grave in a funeral procession, it should be in token of their justice, mercy, and generosity, so that amid general mourning and constant prayers they are commended to God and eternal life, rather than that they should be offered up with universal execration to divine vengeance to suffer everlasting punishments for their savagery, plundering, and cruelty. They cannot vaunt themselves with useless ostentation in the distinguished sepulchres that have been or are to be made ready for them, when the activities of their lifetime are testimonies to pillage and tyranny, not to the virtue or uprightness which are looked for in any man of heroic stature. Those who have been helped by the cunning schemes of the entombed to gain riches of great worth will say, as they pass by, that this is a magnificent and costly edifice. On the other hand, they will hear others claim that it was through unjust outrage to the poor and a thousand crushings of the innocent that this structure was and is laboriously erected. Indeed, not much later, either by the fury of the foe or the voracity of time, you will see it on the verge of disappearance, whereas in the visible writings of learned men it will be revealed, as a permanent example, how profitable or how destructive were the lives of those entombed in that locality. 1
