xvii.] Indeed, it may be said that he now passed his days in continual expectation of poison or the dagger.

This appears plainly in Fulgenzio's biography and in the pages of his private correspondence.

The most considerable of these later conspiracies, of which Fra Fulgenzio gives a full account, implicated Cardinal Borghese and the General of the Servite Order.[147] The history seems in brief to be as follows.

One Fra Bernardo of Perugia, who had served the Cardinal during their student days, took up his residence in Rome so soon as Scipione Borghese became a profitable patron.

In the course of the year 1609, this Fra Bernardo dispatched a fellow-citizen of his, named Fra Giovanni Francesco, to Padua, whence he frequently came across to Venice and tampered with Sarpi's secretary, Fra Antonio of Viterbo.