CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS

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Note.—The Editor's notes are marked with an asterisk.

-3-

THE principal object of the new combination having been attained by the submission of Urbino, followed by that of Camerino, Borgia hastened to anticipate the suspicions of his allies by sending the French succours back to Milan. He however retained a body of troops, and proposed that the chiefs should co-operate with him in reducing Sinigaglia, which was held by the late Prefect's widow. Accordingly, Paolo Orsini, his relation the Duke of Gravina, Vitellozzo, and Liverotto advanced upon that town, the garrison of which was commanded by the celebrated Andrea Doria. This remarkable man, finding himself excluded by the state of parties at Genoa from all prospect of preferment, had in youth adopted the career of a condottiere. He took service with Giovanni della Rovere, distinguishing himself greatly in the campaign of Charles VIII. at Naples; after which he continued attached to the Prefect and his widow, with a hundred light horse. Seeing the case of Sinigaglia desperate, and dreading Liverotto's bitter hatred of the Rovere race, he retired, having first-4- sent off the Prefectess on horseback to Florence, disguised as a friar. On the 28th of December, the assailants took undisputed possession of the city, and sacked it. His prey now in his toils, Valentino, who had lulled their suspicion by keeping aloof with his troops in Romagna, flew to the spot on the pretext of reducing the citadel, and on the 31st arrived at the town with a handful of cavalry.

He was met three miles outside of the gate by the chiefs, and immediately requested their attendance in the house of one Bernardino di Parma, to receive his congratulations and thanks on their success. At the same time he desired quarters to be provided for their respective followings outside of the city, in order to admit his own army, amounting to two thousand cavalry and ten thousand infantry. Startled at the appearance of a force so disproportioned to the service in hand, they would gladly have demurred to this distribution of the troops, but Cesare had contrived that there should be no opportunity for remonstrance, and resistance would have obviously been too late. Affecting a confidence they were far from feeling, the leaders accepted the invitation, and were received with cordiality and distinction. After an interchange of compliments, Borgia withdrew upon some pretext, when there immediately entered his chosen agent of iniquity, Don Michelotto, with several armed followers, who, after some resistance, arrested the Duke of Gravina, Paolo Orsini, Vitellozzo, and Liverotto, with some ten others. Before morning the two last were strangled with a Pisan cord, or violin-string, and a wrench-pin, by the hands of that monster, in his master's presence. Their death, according to Machiavelli, was cowardly, especially that of the blood-stained Liverotto; and their bodies, after being dragged round the piazza, were exposed for three days before burial.

That night Valentino, at the head of his Gascons, attacked six thousand of these captains' troops, which-5- had not dispersed on hearing the capture of their leaders, slaughtering and plundering them with the same barbarity they had themselves used towards the citizens. The greater portion were cut to pieces, and those who escaped reached their homes naked, having only straw tied round their legs. Fabio Orsini was saved by his accidental absence from Borgia's levee; Petrucci and Baglioni, suspicious of treachery, had avoided their fate by previously retiring home. Against the last of these, Borgia marched in a few days, carrying with him the remaining chiefs, of whom he reserved the Orsini until he should hear his father's intentions; but each night after supper he is said to have had one of the others brought out, and put to a cruel death before him. Thus did he, by a dexterous stroke of the most refined duplicity, turn the tools of his ambition into victims of his vengeance, and at the same time ridded himself of faithless adherents, whom any change in his fortune would have again converted into overt and implacable foes.[1]

Vermiglioli, in his life of Malatesta Baglioni, has printed, from the archives of Perugia, a letter from Borgia to the magistrates of that city, which, in consideration of the comparative obscurity of that interesting volume, we shall here translate. It is, perhaps, the only known document fully stating the case of the writer, and so may be regarded as his defence from the charges we have brought against him: the style and orthography are remarkably rude; and the matter abounds in that common expedient,-6- whereby bold and bad men seek to evade merited accusations, by throwing them upon those they have outraged.[2]

News of the Sinigaglia tragedy reached the Pope late in the evening, and he instantly communicated to Cardinal Orsini that Cesare had taken that city, assured that an early visit of congratulation from his Eminence would follow. The Cardinal was perhaps the richest and most influential of his house. He chiefly had organised the league of La Magione, but having always contrived to keep on good terms with Alexander, he believed in the professions of regard with which his Holiness subsequently seduced him from that policy, and thence reposed in him a fatal confidence. Next morning he rode in state to pay his respects at the Vatican, where his own person and those of his principal relations were instantly seized, whilst his magnificent palace at Monte Giordano was pillaged by orders and for the benefit of the Pontiff. After an imprisonment of some weeks, he was cut off by slow poison, prescribed from the same quarter, and died on the 22d of February. Thus did the Pope set his seal of approval on his son's atrocities, which he justified by a poor and pointless jest, avowing that as the confederates of La Magione, after stipulating that they should not be required to re-enter the service of Valentino unless singly, had thought fit to place themselves within his power en masse, they merited their fate as forsworn.

The massacre of Sinigaglia has been condemned by every writer except Machiavelli, and posterity has in severe retribution suspected him of abetting it. This charge-10- possesses a twofold interest, as inculpating the character of the historian, and as affecting the morality of the age.[*3] In the latter view alone does it fall under our consideration: yet however horrible these wholesale murders, they are more remarkable in Italian history as the crowning crime of an ambitious career, and as widely influencing the political aspect of Romagna and La Marca, than from their relative enormity. The fates of the young Astorre Manfredi of Faenza, of Fogliano of Fermo, of the Lord of Camerino and his three sons, have all been mentioned in these pages as occurring within a year or two of this event. It would be easy to swell the catalogue of slaughter; and we find Baglioni and Vitellozzo both classed with Cesare himself in the category of murder, by a chronicler of Alexander VI., who also quotes from the mouth of Giovanni Bentivoglio, at the diet of La Magione, this bravado, "I shall assassinate Duke Valentino should I be so lucky as to have opportunity."[4] The spirit of the age is further illustrated by its unnumbered poisonings: and the fact that Machiavelli should neither have used his influence with Valentino to avert the massacre of the confederates, nor his pen to brand the treachery of that foul deed, is but another link in the evidence from which we may deduce the total extinction of moral feeling, which, anticipating the worst doctrines of Loyola, carried them out with a selfishness, falsehood, and cruelty unparalleled in the annals of human civilisation.[*5]

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Gianpaolo Baglioni having fled to Siena, Valentino followed him in that direction, after taking possession of Perugia, and learning that Città di Castello, abandoned by the adherents of the Vitelli, had been plundered by his own partizans. On the 18th of January, hearing at Città della Pieve of the blow struck by his father against the Orsini, and that Fabio, who escaped the snare at Sinigaglia, was ravaging the Campagna, he handed over Paolo and the Duke of Gravina to the tender mercies of Michelotto, whose noose quickly encircled their necks. Invading the Sienese, he carried fire and sword by Chiusi as far as Pienza and San Quirico, massacring even the aged and infirm with horrible tortures. His real object, besides revenging himself upon Petrucci and Baglioni, was to add Siena to his territory, but his position being then a delicate one with France, he accepted the proposal of that republic to purchase safety, by exiling Petrucci their seigneur, and dismissing Baglioni their guest.[*6]

This series of rapid successes is ascribed by Machiavelli to the policy of Valentino in ridding himself of his French auxiliaries and his mercenary confederates, and so being enabled, during the brief remainder of his career, to give his talents and energy full scope in the conduct of an army entirely devoted to his views. His conquests had now extended along the eastern fall of the Apennines, from Imola to Camerino, and included the upper vale of the Tiber and the principality of Piombino. He had but to add to them Siena, and the best part of Central Italy from sea to sea would be his own. The eyes of Louis, at length opened to a danger which he had so long fostered, were not blinded by Cesare's affected moderation in claiming his recent acquisitions rather for the Church-12- than for himself, and that monarch hastened to caution him from further hostilities against Tuscany. The successes of Fabio Orsini around Rome at the same time called for his presence, so he changed his route to make a foray upon the holdings of that family about the Lake of Bracciano, with whom the Colonna and Savelli had united against their common enemies the Borgia. This opportunity was greedily seized by the Pontiff to carry out his long cherished policy of breaking the power of the great barons, and the castles of the Orsini having one after another been reduced, their influence ceased for the future to be formidable either to their sovereign or their neighbours.

But it is time we should return to Urbino, where we left the citizens bewailing the departure of their Duke. As soon as he was gone, Antonio di S. Savino took possession of the place in name of Valentino, and issued a proclamation enjoining the townsfolk to disarm, the peasantry to return home, and all to surrender whatever they had stolen the day before from the palace. In the afternoon, after a conciliatory harangue to the people, he took his lodging in the palace. Next morning, after mass, the Bishop published a general amnesty, and oaths of allegiance to the new sovereign were administered. Towards evening the bells were rung, and a bonfire was lit in the piazza; but these were heartless and forced rejoicings, and no bribes could induce even the children to raise the cry of "Valenza." Nor was this sadness without cause, for the soldiery of Orsini and Vitellozzo, who still quartered in the town, treated all with such outrage, that many of the inhabitants prayed for death to close their sufferings, envying those who were summoned from such scenes of misery. But when the troops were withdrawn, the mild character and popular manners of Antonio the governor, skilfully seconding the conciliatory policy which Borgia-13- had resolved upon, gave matters another aspect, and occasioned surprise to those who knew the cruel perfidy of their new master. Various notorious abuses were put down under severe penalties, especially the acceptance of presents by judges, and the following up of private vengeance. The deputy governor, Giovanni da Forlì, was however a man of quite opposite temperament, whose harshness soon counteracted these gentler influences, and occasioned general disgust. But the people heard with satisfaction the tragedy of Sinigaglia; for to the perfidy of the chiefs and the brutality of their army, the loss of their independence and the whole of their late misfortunes were unanimously ascribed; and a permission to ravage the territory of the Vitelli, now publicly proclaimed throughout the duchy, was by many greedily seized.

Borgia, having secured fourteen distinguished inhabitants of Urbino as hostages, ordered that the fortresses left by agreement in the hands of Guidobaldo should be attempted: that of Maiuolo was accordingly surprised about the beginning of May, and easily reduced. S. Leo being better provided, as well as considered impregnable, its siege was more methodically undertaken, and levies were ordered to reinforce the assailants. The amount of public sympathy with the cause may be estimated from Baldi's assertion that, in the city of Urbino, the utmost difficulty was experienced in raising eight foot soldiers with one month's pay. Eight hundred Gascons in the French service were obtained from De la Tremouille; but these, having turned the siege into a sort of blockade, were dispersed among the neighbouring villages, where, on the 5th of June, their revels were suddenly interrupted by unknown assailants, who disappeared as mysteriously as they had issued from the mountain defiles, leaving many of the besiegers slain or wounded. The surrounding peasantry, catching the enthusiasm, rushed to arms, and, but for extraordinary exertions, the whole duchy would have once more been-14- out for their legitimate lord. News of this movement having reached the Duke early in July, he obtained from Florence free passage through her territory, and from the Venetians a promise of passive support, and thereupon put himself into communication with his principal adherents, by means of letters carried by persons of low condition, many of which were unfortunately intercepted by the lieutenant-governor of Urbino. His people were thus kept in a fever of expectation; but, finally, this plan of an invasion was abandoned, whereupon he repaired to Mantua, to his brother-in-law the Marquis, who had been taken into the French service under De la Tremouille, and engaged him to represent to Louis the hardships of his case, and the danger of Borgia's excessive ambition.

Disgusted with their ignominious overthrow at S. Leo, the Gascons assumed the habitual licence of such mercenaries, by soon taking their departure from

The siege was nevertheless maintained by the commandant of Romagna; but the place was ably and spiritedly defended by Ottaviano Fregoso, who will soon attract our notice in other scenes. Marini has recorded another act of romantic daring by the same Brizio who, in the preceding year, had surprised the place. Fregoso's tiny garrison being greatly exhausted by the long blockade, he, with one Marzio, made his way, during a violent storm of rain, over the rocks, and through the beleaguering force, and reached a castle near Mantua where Guidobaldo then was. In vain these emissaries besought him for a reinforcement of two hundred men; for, thinking it would only waste their gallantry by prolonging a hopeless struggle, he thankfully declined their proposal. At length their urgency obtained twenty-five men who happened-15- to be at hand, and with these they returned to the leaguer. Marzio, boldly presenting himself to the commandant, volunteered to join the besiegers with his little party, which being accepted, he advanced them under the walls, whence, having been recognised by the garrison, they made a rush to the upper gate, and were received into the fortress ere the trick was discovered. By this timely succour, S. Leo was enabled to hold out until the restoration of its rightful sovereign; and its brave defenders did not even falter at the threat of summary vengeance upon their wives and families, who had been brought to the palace of Urbino to answer for their obstinacy.

Christendom was now to be appalled by a fearful catastrophe, which fitly closed the career of the Borgias, diverting their wonted weapons to their own destruction, for—

Alexander and his son perceiving that they could no longer turn to good account the co-operation of Louis for their grasping schemes, began to look round for new combinations: having squeezed the orange they were ready to throw aside the rind. But to such projects their exhausted treasury offered serious obstacles. To supply it they had recourse, on an extended scale, to an expedient which they had invented, and already occasionally employed,—that of poisoning the richest cardinals, seizing on their treasures, and selling their vacant hats to the highest bidders. Among the most recent and wealthy of the sacred college was Adrian of Corneto, and he was therefore selected as next victim. On the 12th of August, the Pope and Cesare invited him to sup in the Belvidere casino of the Vatican, and the latter sent forward a supply-16- of poisoned wine, in charge of his butler, with strict injunctions not to serve it until specially desired by himself. Several other cardinals were to partake of the banquet, and, probably, were intended to share the drugged potion. Alexander had been assured by an astrologer that, so long as he had about him the sacramental wafer, he should not die; and, accordingly, he constantly carried it in a little golden box; but, having on that evening forgotten it upon his toilet, he sent Monsignor Caraffa, afterwards Paul IV., to fetch it. Meanwhile, overcome by the dog-day heat, he called for wine. The butler was gone to fetch a salver of peaches, which had been presented to his Holiness, and his deputy, having received no instructions as to the medicated bottles, offered a draught from them to the Pope. He greedily swallowed it, and his example was more moderately followed by Cesare; thus,

Scarcely had they taken their seats at the table, when the two victims successively fell down insensible, from the virulence of the poison, and were carried to bed. The Pontiff rallied so far as to recover consciousness, and to linger for about a week, but at length sank under the shock and the fever which supervened, his age being seventy-one, and his constitution enervated by long debauchery. The last sacraments were duly administered, and it was remarked that, during his illness, he never alluded to his children Cesare and Lucrezia, through life the objects of an overweening, if not criminal fondness, in whose behalf most of his outrages upon the peace and the rights of mankind had been committed. His death occurred on the 18th of August.[*8] -17-

Such is the account of this awful retribution given by Tommasi, from which most other narratives but slightly deviate as to dates or immaterial details. Another version, however, occurs in Sanuto's Diaries, which, being contemporary, and probably supplied from the diplomatic correspondence of the Signory, merits notice, and has not been hitherto published. The Cardinal of Corneto, who figures prominently in this narrative, was made collector for Peter's pence in England, and Bishop of Hereford, from whence he was translated to Bath and Wells. We shall find him compromised in Petrucci's conspiracy against Leo X., but the following charge of pope-poisoning is new.

"The Lord Adrian Castillense of Corneto, Cardinal Datary, having been desired by the Pope to receive him and Duke Valentino at supper in his vineyard, his Holiness supplying the eatables, this Cardinal presumed the invitation to be planned for his death by poison, so that the Duke might obtain his money and benefices, which were considerable. In order to save himself there seemed but one course, so, watching his opportunity, he summoned the Pontiff's steward, whom he knew intimately, and on his arrival received him alone in a private chamber, where 10,000 ducats were laid out: these he desired him to accept for love of him, offering him also more of his property, which he declared he could continue to enjoy only through his assistance, and adding, 'You certainly are aware of the Pope's disposition, and I know that he and the Duke have designed my death by poison through you; wherefore I pray you have pity on me and spare my life.' The steward, moved with compassion on hearing this, at length avowed the plan concerted for administering the poison; that, after the supper, he was to serve three boxes of-18- confections, one for the Pope, another for the Duke, and a third for the Cardinal, the last being poisoned; so they arranged that the service of the table should be contrived in such a way that the Pontiff might eat of the Cardinal's poisoned box, and die. On the appointed day, the Pope having arrived at the vineyard with the Duke, the Cardinal threw himself at his Holiness' feet and kissed them, saying he had a boon to request, and would not rise until it were granted. The Pope assuring him of his consent, he continued, 'Holy Father! on the lord's coming to his servant's house, it is not meet that the servant should sit with his lord; and the just and proper favour I ask is permission for the servant to wait at the table of your Holiness.' The supper being thus served, and the moment arrived for giving the confections, the box having been poisoned by the steward as directed by the Pope, the Cardinal placed it before his Holiness, who, relying on his steward, and convinced of the Cardinal's sincerity by his service, ate joyfully of this box, as did the Cardinal of the other, which the Pontiff believed the poisoned one. Thereafter, at the hour when from its nature the poison took effect, his Holiness began to feel it, and thus he died: the Cardinal being still alarmed, took medicine and an emetic, and was easily cured."

The death of Alexander by poison is generally credited, although Raynaldus and Muratori, willing to mitigate so heinous a scandal, incline to the few and obscure authorities who attribute it to tertian fever. It was natural that the truth should be glossed over, especially in despatches addressed to the court of his daughter Lucrezia, to which the latter annalist probably had access. But though the earliest intelligence of the event forwarded by the Venetian envoy alludes to the Pope's seizure as fever, his subsequent letters, quoted by Sanuto, thus loathsomely confirm the current suspicion of poison having been administered. "On this day [19th] I saw the Pontiff's corpse, whose-19- apparel was not worth two ducats. He was swollen beyond the size of one of our large wine-skins. Never since the Christian era was a more horrible and terrible sight witnessed. The blood flowed from ears, mouth, and nose faster than it could be wiped away; his lips were larger than a man's fist, and in his open mouth the blood boiled as in a caldron on the fire, and kept incessantly flowing as from a spout; all which I report from observation."[9]

The character of Alexander VI. as a man and as a sovereign admits of no question, and is thus forcibly summed up by Sismondi. "He was the most notoriously immoral man in Christendom; one whose debauchery no shame restrained, whose treaties no good faith sanctioned, whose policy was never guarded by justice, to whose vengeance pity was unknown."[*10] As a pontiff he must be tried-20- by a different test, and those ecclesiastical writers, who attempt not to defend his morals or example, assert the orthodoxy of his faith and doctrine, and commend the wisdom of his provisions for maintenance of that religion which regarded him as its head. He was the first to establish the censorship of books,[*11] an important bulwark of the Roman Church; and among the orders which he instituted or protected was that of S. Francesco di Paolo. Nor can it be doubted that his ambitious nepotism eventually aggrandised the temporal possessions of the papacy, by quelling the mutinous barons of the Campagna, and by so crushing the more distant seigneurs as to render their states a speedy and easy prey to Julius II. On the other hand, the openly simoniacal practices which prevailed during his reign, the strong measures adopted to raise money for his private ends by a lavish scale of indulgences, and, generally, the unscrupulous employment of the power of the keys and the treasures of the Church for unworthy purposes, all tended to alienate men's minds, and to stir those doubts which the different, but not less injudicious, policy of his immediate successors ripened into schism.

Favoured by youth, constitution, and energy of mind, Cesare Borgia wrestled successfully with the deadly ingredients which he had inadvertently swallowed. He is said to have been saved by being frequently placed in the carcass of a newly-killed bullock or mule, and, whether in consequence of this treatment, or of the inflammatory nature of the potion, to have lost the whole skin of his body. He had flattered himself that, foreseeing every possible contingency which his father's death could develop, he had so planned his measures as to secure, in any event, his own safety, and the maintenance of his authority. But, never having anticipated being disabled from action at that very-21- juncture, his well-laid schemes fell to the ground, a signal illustration of the proverb, "Man proposes, God disposes." By means of Don Michelotto, he was, however, able to draw round the Vatican a body of twelve thousand devoted troops, and that unscrupulous agent executed his instructions by seizing about 500,000 ducats in money, jewels, and valuables, from the Pope's apartment, before his death was published.

The Diaries of Sanuto give a lively description of the immediate effects of Alexander's death on Lower Italy,—the exultations of the people, the prompt movements of the Campagna barons, the hesitation of Valentino, the intrigues of the cardinals. As soon as the good news transpired, Rome rose in arms against the Spaniards; and the Colonna and the Orsini, entering at the head of their troops, willingly aided in spoiling and slaughtering these countrymen of the Borgia, who "could nowhere find holes to hide in." Even their cardinals narrowly escaped a general massacre; and on the 8th of September, a proclamation by the College cleared the city of these foreigners on pain of the gibbet. Duke Valentino, although prostrated in strength, and "seeming as if burnt from the middle downwards," was not without formidable resources. His hope was, that in the distracted state of Rome, the cardinals would provide for their personal safety by holding the conclave in St. Angelo, where the election would be in his own hands. This calculation was, however, defeated by their assembling at the Minerva convent, guarded by the barons of Bracciano and Palestrina, with the bravest of the citizens, and protected by barricades which withstood an assault by the redoubted Michelotto. Still his troops were staunch, the Vatican and St. Angelo were his, and he had secured the treasure of the Holy See. But his nerve gave way, and after turning the castle guns against the Orsini palace on Monte Giordano, he fled in a litter to the French camp without the gates, on the 1st of-22- September, and thence made his way to the stronghold of Nepi. This vacillation brought its fitting recompense, and lost him the advantages of his position. Hesitating betwixt the Colonna and Orsini factions, wavering between Spanish and French interests, his friends dropped off, his forces melted away, and he lost the favourable moment for swaying the papal election.

The rival parties in the conclave, having had no time to mature their plans, in consequence of the late Pontiff's sudden decease, trusted to strengthen their respective interests by delay, and so were unanimous in choosing, on the 22nd of September, the most feeble of their body, the respected Piccolomini, who survived his exaltation as Pius III. but twenty-six days. The state of matters at Naples added to the general embarrassment. The ceaseless struggles for that crown had of late taken a new turn, the contest being now between Louis of France and Ferdinand of Spain. The Borgia, long adherents of the former, had recently inclined to the Spanish side; but their influence was now irretrievably gone.

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WHILST Valentino and his partizans thus had their hands full at Rome, Romagna and his recent conquests threw off his rule. His officers had concealed the first news of the tragedy at the Vatican, but, on the 22nd of August, authentic intelligence of the death of Alexander and the illness of his son having reached Urbino, through some emissaries of Guidobaldo who announced that the moment for action had arrived, the people ran to arms. The governor fled to Cesena; his lieutenant was slain in the tumult; the siege of S. Leo was raised; and in one day the entire duchy, except one unimportant castle, returned to its lawful sovereign.[*12]

On hearing that the Pope and Cesare were both ill, the Duke of Urbino hastily quitted Venice, his honourable and secure retreat, leaving behind, in the words of Bembo, "a high reputation for superhuman genius, for admirable acquirements, for singular discretion." As a parting favour, that republic advanced him 3000 or 4000 ducats, towards the expenses of his restoration. He wrote desiring his-24- nephew Fregoso to send over a detachment from S. Leo, to maintain order in his capital, and himself following upon the steps of his messenger, reached that fortress on the 27th of August. Next day he proceeded to Urbino, where, Castiglione tells us, "he was met by swarms of children bearing olive-boughs, and hailing his auspicious arrival; by aged sires tottering under their years, and weeping for joy; by men and women; by mothers with their babes; by crowds of every age and sex; nay, the very stones seemed to exult and leap." Women of all ranks flocked in from the adjacent townships, with tambourines played before them, to see their sovereign, and touch his hand; whilst popular fury spent itself upon the usurper's armorial ensigns, which had been painted in fresco over the city gates a few months before by Timoteo Vite, at the rate of from one to four ducats each.[*13]

The example of Urbino was quickly followed by Sinigaglia, Pesaro, and the other principalities; and by October, a confederacy for their common maintenance and defence, under oaths and a mutual bond of 10,000 ducats, was organised by these three states, along with Camerino, Perugia, Piombino, Città di Castello, and Rimini, in all which the exiled seigneurs had resumed their ascendancy.

It was a condition of this league, that no step or engagement should be taken by any of the parties without the sanction of Guidobaldo, who a month before had strengthened his position by accepting service from the Venetians. The Signory engaged to protect him during life in his state, against all attacks, and to pay him annually 20,000 scudi, he maintaining for them a hundred men-at-arms, and a hundred and fifty light cavalry, besides placing at their disposal, for instant service, two thousand foot. These were forthwith sent to ravage the neighbour-25-hood of Cesena, which remained faithful to Valentino, and thereafter, co-operating with other forces of the new league under Ottaviano Fregoso, they attacked in succession such citadels and castles as were held for the usurper.

The star of Borgia seemed once more in the ascendant. Early in October Cesare, now able to bestride a mule, returned to Rome, attended by a hundred and fifty men-at-arms and a hundred halberdiers, where he patched up a reconciliation with the Orsini faction, then dominant. From motives which it would now be difficult to trace, the new Pontiff received him with favour, and named him captain-general of the Church. But in this crisis of his destiny he displayed no elevation of character. Disconcerted by the embarrassment of his position, perhaps by the admonitions of conscience, uncertain where to repose confidence or look for support, he quickly repented having trusted himself in the city, and longed to escape from its incensed populace and exasperated factions to the shelter of his strongholds in Romagna. Humbling himself before Gian-Giordano Orsini, the enemy of his race, he obtained a promise of his escort across the Campagna; but perceiving, ere he had cleared the gate, that he was in the hands of men by whom old grudges were not forgotten, he fled in panic to the Vatican. There he crouched beneath the doubtful favour of Pius, and the waning influence of the Spanish cardinals, who vainly sought to protect his property from pillage, and to expedite his escape in disguise, until the Holy See was again vacated by its short-lived occupant.[14]

-26-

Thus was that make-shift policy defeated by which the late conclave had sought time for strengthening their interests and maturing their intrigues: a new election was at hand ere its elements had subsided from their recent turmoil. The Orsini were paramount in the city, the Spaniards in the Sacred College. A struggle ensued whether the former should obtain an order for Valentino's departure, or should themselves withdraw from Rome before the conclave was closed. Victory declared for the Iberian cardinals, by aid of Ascanio Sforza, who sought to conciliate their suffrages for himself. Once again the bantling of fortune had the game in his hand, again to play it away. Holding, as was supposed, at his absolute disposal the votes of the Borgian cardinals, he was courted by all who aspired to the tiara; and in hopes of retrieving his affairs by the election of a friendly pope, he took measures for throwing his whole influence into the scale of Amboise, Cardinal of Rouen, as organ of the French party. But that strong will and indomitable resolution which had triumphantly carried him through many crimes were now wanting. From day to day his plans faltered and his policy wavered; finally his efforts failed. Men were wearied of the feeble counsels, the selfish epicureanism, the public scandals of recent pontiffs. To rescue the Church from utter degradation, a very different category of qualifications was required, and even the electors felt that they must find a pope in all respects the reverse of Alexander.

There was no member of the Sacred College whom Valentino had such reason to fear and hate, none of whose domineering ambition the Consistory stood in such awe, as Giulio della Rovere. Yet did his master-spirit overcome all opposition. On the day preceding the conclave he effected a reconciliation with the Spaniards, and his ancient rival Ascanio Sforza sought his friendship. As he rode to enter upon its duties, the cortège of attendant-27- prelates equalled that which usually swelled the train of an elected pope. Before the door was closed, bets of eighty-two to a hundred were made on his success, one hundred to six being offered against any other candidate. It was, therefore, scarcely matter of surprise that within an hour or two thereafter Julius II. was chosen by acclamation, without a scrutiny.[15]

At the last moment, Borgia's adherents, finding opposition vain, thought it best to lay the new occupant of St. Peter's chair under the obligation of their suffrages, a policy which Machiavelli had justly condemned as the greatest blunder ever committed by their leader. Some historians allege that their support was gained by an offer of Julius to maintain him in his dignities and investitures, betrothing his infant daughter to his own nephew the young Lord Prefect. Unlikely as this may seem, there is much apparent inconsistency in the Pontiff's treatment of him, which, if our authorities are to be trusted, showed nothing of that choleric temperament and energetic firmness which habitually characterised him. Within two days of his election, when speaking of Valentino to the Venetian envoy, he said, "We shall let him get off with all he has robbed from the Church in his evil hour, but would that the towns of Romagna were taken from him." Yet a change appears to have supervened, induced perhaps by Cesare's representations, which had formerly been successful with Pius III., that, under his sway, the influence of the Church in that province of her patrimony would be far better maintained than by handing it again to the old dynasties, whom he had with difficulty eradicated, and who had ever been turbulent vassals of the Apostolic-28- Chamber. The now manifest intention of the Venetians to obtain a footing in that quarter, upon various pretexts founded on claims of the Manfredi and others of the dispossessed lords, gave cogency to this reasoning in the eyes of Julius, whose paramount policy of at all hazards aggrandising the keys, rendered Valentino's sovereignty preferable to such extension of their dominion, and may have somewhat extenuated the Borgian policy in his eyes. He therefore brought the usurper from St. Angelo to lodge in the Vatican, and entered with seeming cordiality into his views. But the lapse of a few days found his Holiness in another mood, declaring that his guest should not hold a single battlement throughout Italy, but might be thankful if spared his life and the treasures he had plundered, most of which were however already dissipated. From that moment the prestige of his position was at an end, and he remained at the palace "in small repute."

The crisis soon became urgent, for the Venetian troops were pouring upon Romagna, whilst the few fortresses that still owned Borgia as their master were gradually falling to the confederate chiefs, led by Guidobaldo. On the 9th of November, letters, demanding these captured castles in the name of the Signory, found the latter ill of gout; but in reply he expressed surprise at the summons, seeing that he had wrested them from the usurper, and hoped to hold them for the pope elect, and in security for the valuables of which he had been pillaged. In consideration, perhaps, of his being then actually in pay of the Republic, he agreed to deliver up Verucchio and Cesenatico, whereupon the messenger reported him to the Doge as "a good Christian, but in want of some one to counsel him."

In this exigency, Cesare proposed to surrender to the Pope the citadels of Cesena, Bertinoro, Forlì, and Forlimpopoli, as a means of immediately arresting the progress of their assailants, and of cutting short the schemes of Venice, offering to serve the Church during the rest of his-29- life in any capacity that was thought expedient. This offer Julius declined, but gave him liberty to repair to the scene of action, and act for the best with what troops he could raise. He accordingly went to Ostia on the 19th of November, meaning to take shipping for Upper Italy; but on the 21st the Pontiff, alarmed at the progress of the Venetians, and influenced by Guidobaldo, who, arriving on that day, had demanded justice upon Borgia, thought better of it, and sent to get from him the countersigns of his citadels. These Valentino refusing, he was brought back to Rome under arrest on the 29th, and, after much temporising, ultimately gave the necessary passwords for the surrender of his last hold upon his recent dominions.

Such seem the admitted facts of the Pope's treatment of Borgia. His change of conduct may have been dictated by new circumstances coming to his knowledge, or it may have been part of a systematic deception, in order to turn Valentino's influence to his own purposes. The opinions of Giovio and De Thou show that such treachery as Guicciardini charges upon Julius, and as Cesare met soon after from Gonsalvo di Cordova, was regarded by the lax public and private morality of the age as justified by his own infamous perfidies. On the other hand, it is admitted that the Cardinal della Rovere's high reputation for good faith was one of his recommendations to the conclave. Bossi, in an additional note to vol. IV. of his translation of Leo X., considers this dark passage of history to be cleared up by the narrative of Baldi, regarding Guidobaldo's generous treatment of the enemy of his house, to which he attributes the moderation of his Holiness; but this view does not seem borne out either by dates or by Baldi's words.[*16]

Thus terminated Duke Valentino's connection with-30- the immediate subject of this narrative. A few words will suffice to trace the remainder of his fluctuating fortunes. Having been again transmitted to Ostia, he remained there a sort of prisoner at large until April, 1504, when his escape to Naples was connived at. There he was received with distinction by Gonsalvo di Cordova, viceroy of Ferdinand II.; but soon after, an order arrived from that king to send him prisoner to Spain. With this command, suggested probably by a brief from Julius, which Raynaldus has printed, the Great Captain at once complied, although Borgia held his safe-conduct,—a breach of faith which the Spanish historians justify by the alleged detection of schemes and intrigues, originated by Cesare and perilous to the ascendancy of his Catholic Majesty. Yet we learn that the Viceroy's last hour seemed troubled by repentance for this stain upon his conscience, which even in his day of pride one chivalrous spirit had dared thus to question. Baldassare Scipio of Siena, a free captain long in Cesare's service, publicly placarded a challenge to any Spaniard who should venture to maintain "that the Duke Valentino had not been arrested at Naples, in direct violation of a safe-conduct granted in the names of Ferdinand and Isabella, to the great infamy and infinite faithlessness of all their crowns." On reaching the land of his fathers, this incarnate spirit of a blood-stained age was confined in the castle of Medina del Campo, and the interest used for his release by the Spanish cardinals, and by his brothers-in-law the King of Navarre and the Duke of Ferrara, who offered their guarantee for his good behaviour, was, during three years, unavailing on the ground of his dangerous character. At length he made his escape by a rope-ladder or cord, under circumstances so fool-hardy as to be ascribed by the country people to supernatural aid, and reached the King of Navarre, who gave him the command of an expedition against the Count de Lérin. On the 10th of-31- March, 1507, he fell into an ambuscade near Viane, and was cut to pieces fighting desperately. By a singular coincidence, his stripped and plundered body, having been recognised by a servant, was interred in the church of Pampeluna, the archbishopric of which had been his earliest promotion. Short as was his life (for he seems to have died under thirty) he had survived all his dignities and distinctions, realising the distich of Sannazaro,

Valentino's was a character peculiar to Spain, with which Pizarro alone seems to have matched. His boundless ambition was profoundly selfish and utterly unscrupulous; his energy of purpose owned no impulse but egotism; his capacity was marred by meanness; his splendid tastes served but as incentives to spoliation. The demands of honour, the compunctions of conscience, the value of human life availed nothing in his eyes. In him foresight became fraud, calculation cunning, prudence perfidy, courage cruelty. His daring, his constancy, his talent were devoted to murder, rapine, and treachery. His campaigns were massacres, his justice vengeance, his diplomacy a trick. Generosity was a stranger to his impulses, remorse to his crimes.

Fortune, so long adverse to Guidobaldo, at length smiled upon him. The election to the tiara of his relative and confidential friend, Cardinal della Rovere, freed him from anxiety as to the restoration of his duchy, and promised him a long career of prosperity and honour. His policy of supporting the Venetians in their views upon Romagna thus not only became superfluous as a check upon Borgia, but seemed not unlikely to place him in a dilemma with-32- the Camera. The new Pontiff, therefore, lost no time in removing him from a position of such delicacy, by summoning him to Rome. The invitation found him encamped before Verucchio, whence he immediately set out; and, after devoting two days at Urbino to public thanksgivings and festivities for his own restoration and for the election of Julius, he performed the journey in a litter, his gout preventing him from riding. On the eleventh day, being the 20th of November, he was met at the Ponte Molle by a superbly caparisoned mule, and on it was painfully but honourably escorted by an imposing cortège to his apartment in the Vatican, under a salute from the artillery of St. Angelo. Notwithstanding his fatigue, he was bidden by the impatient Pontiff to supper that evening, and was received by his Holiness on the landing-place with equal favour and distinction.

In the explanations which followed, their mutual views were frankly stated. The claim which the Venetians had upon Guidobaldo, from extending to him their hospitality and support in almost desperate circumstances, was fully allowed by the Pope, and his avowal that, in co-operating with them in an invasion of Romagna, he conceived they were thwarting Borgia, not the Church, was accepted as satisfactory. But his Holiness intimated, with reference to the future, that the vassal of the Apostolic See had duties paramount to all foreign ties; and that, since the rights of the Camera over that province admitted of no compromise, he would do well to resign the service of the Republic, and recall his consort to administer his affairs at home, whilst he remained in Rome for the winter. To these suggestions the Duke agreed, and wrote in most grateful terms to the government of Venice, explaining the obstacles which had unexpectedly arisen to his repaying at that moment the obligations he had incurred. We learn from Sanuto that on the 10th of October the Duchess with her ladies went into college, and being-33- seated near the Doge, thanked the Signory in her lord's name for the favour, command, and protection granted to him, to which the Doge replied blandly, asserting the love borne him by the Republic. Again, on the 15th of November, there came into the cabinet of the Signory "the Duchess of Urbino with Madonna Emilia and her company of damsels to take leave, for she is departing early to-morrow morning for her duchy; she goes in a barge by the Po as far as Ravenna, and from thence on horseback: and the Doge spake her fair, and having taken leave, we sages of the orders accompanied her as far as the palace-gates, and she proceeded along the Mercery, reaching home on the 2d of December."

Borgia took the opportunity of Guidobaldo's visit to make advances for a reconciliation, having reason to dread his influence with the Pope. These were received with courtesy; but, in the words of the Venetian chronicler just quoted, "the Duke was resolved to have his own again, especially the library, which was promised him without damage, with the tapestries, although the Cardinal of Rouen had already got a good share of them." According to Baldi's elaborate and somewhat too dramatic description of their interview, he magnanimously forgave the extraordinary injuries he had received from his now humbled adversary. On the authority of private letters, an anonymous diary, already noticed, states that the usurper threw himself, cap-in-hand, at the Duke's feet, beseeching mercy and pardon, and excusing his conduct on the plea of youth, the brutality of his father, and the persuasions of others. This incident was represented in a fresco by Taddeo Zucchero, which I saw at Cagli in 1843, and which had been cut from the villa built at S. Angelo in Vado, by Duke Guidobaldo II. Cesare is a slight figure handsomely dressed, with long sharp features, a high nose and reddish hair. He kneels before the Duke of Urbino, raising his cap, whilst one notary appears to-34- read aloud an act of surrender, and another makes an instrument upon the transaction.[18]

Even after Valentino had given authority for a surrender of the citadels in Romagna, they were held by his officers upon the plea that he was not a free agent, and the bearer of his missive was hanged by the castellan of Cesena. At length the Pope ordered Guidobaldo to reduce them by force. For this purpose he named him gonfaloniere of the Church, retaining him and four hundred men-at-arms, with a year's pay of 7000 ducats in advance. It was about this time that he was invested with the insignia of the Garter, to which illustrious order he had been elected in February. His acquisition of this dignity, and Count Baldassare Castiglione's mission to London as proxy at his installation, form an episode of so much interest to an English reader that we have gleaned every possible notice of these events, and have arranged them in II. of the Appendix.

The Duke left Rome for his command, accompanied by his nephew the Prefettino, as he was then usually called from his youth, who had returned from France three months before to wait upon his Holiness. They were attended by Castiglione, who, after charming Julius by his polished society, was permitted by him to transfer his services to the court of Guidobaldo, of which he became the ornament and commentator. On the 1st of June they reached Urbino, and found the Duchess re-established among an attached people, who, to drive away sad recollections of their recent sufferings, had amused her during the preceding carnival with scenic imitations of the principal events of the usurpation! One of these was the comedy (so called rather in a Dantesque than a comic sense) of the Duke Valentino and Pope Alexander VI. In it were successively represented their plotting the seizure of the state, their sending the-35- Lady Lucrezia to Ferrara, their inviting the Duchess to her wedding, the invasion of the duchy, the duke's first return, and his redeparture, the massacre of the confederates, the death of the Pope, and the Duke's restoration to his rights.

The garrisons of Cesena and Bertinoro had surrendered ere Guidobaldo took the field, that of Forlì came to terms as soon as his troops appeared. With it passed the last wreck of the Borgian substantial power and vast ambition, within a year from the death of Alexander, leaving to future times no memorial but a name doomed to lasting execration. Guidobaldo had at the same time the satisfaction of recovering most of the valuables that had been pillaged from his palace, estimated by him at not less than 100,000 ducats, especially a large proportion of his father's celebrated library.

On the 6th of September the Duke retraced his steps to Urbino, and there at length renewed the long-suspended joys of his secure and tranquil residence. Few, perhaps, of their rank and age, less needed such rough discipline to inculcate moderation, than this exemplary couple. Yet must the lessons of adversity have been ordained for some purifying purpose, and we may indulge the hope that they were not sent in vain. The Duke devoted his earliest leisure to signalise his gratitude for the unflinching loyalty of his subjects by conferring upon their several municipalities various privileges and immunities, and remitting their fiscal arrears. The Duchess expressed her thankfulness by many works of piety, by liberal charities, and by instituting a three days' fair on the anniversary of her lord's restoration. Their domestic circle was agreeably enlarged by the arrival of the Lady Prefectess, as the widow of Giovanni delle Rovere was entitled, who, on returning from a similar exile, and after paying her reverence to her brother-in-law the Pope, hastened to join her son at her brother's court. We have noticed the services which when-36- assailed by Valentino, she received from Andrea Doria; they were now acknowledged by Guidobaldo with the castle of Sassocorbaro, and other holdings. Another guest at Urbino was Sigismondo Varana, the young heir of Camerino, who arrived with his mother Maria, sister of the Prefettino, and with his uncle and guardian Giovanni Maria, who afterwards supplanted him in that state.

Urbino was now enlivened by an event which proved of paramount interest to its sovereign, and was destined by providence to carry forward its independence and glories under a new dynasty. We have seen how it had been proposed between the Cardinal della Rovere and Guidobaldo, in 1498, that the latter should adopt the young Prefect as his heir, and procure from the Pope a renewal of the Dukedom and investitures to his favour.[19] The simulated sanction of Alexander to this arrangement led to no result; but, as soon as Julius was fixed in the seat of St. Peter, he took measures for placing his nephew's prospects beyond question. In the natural course of events the state of Urbino would lapse to the Holy See on the Duke's death, and, as the uniform policy of this Pontiff was to unite to it as many such fiefs as the failure of their seigneurs or the force of his arms brought within his grasp, his making an exception of the most valuable of them all in favour of his own nephew gave rise to not a few strictures. It is, however, the only instance in which nepotism can be laid to his charge, and the precedents left him by recent Popes may be pleaded in justification of a comparatively trifling abuse.

On the 14th of September the Archbishop of Ragusa arrived at Urbino as papal nuncio, charged with brieves for the completion of this affair, and also with the ensigns of command for the Duke as generalissimo of the ecclesiastical troops. The ceremonials consequent upon the implement of his mission have been detailed by Baldi,-37- and are characteristic of the times we are endeavouring to depict. The nuncio and his splendid suite were received with distinction, and next day, being Sunday, was fixed for Guidobaldo's installation. The whole court and principal inhabitants being assembled in the cathedral, high mass was performed by him, after which, standing in front of the altar, he laid aside his mitre, and pronounced a solemn benediction on the two standards of the Church, which were held furled by a canon, whilst he waved incense over them, and sprinkled them with holy water. This ended, he desired them to be mounted on their staves, and having sat down and resumed his mitre, he presented them to the Duke, who received them, devoutly kneeling on the altar-steps, and handed one to Ottaviano Fregoso, the other to Morello d'Ortona. He then received the baton, with the like ceremonies, and rose, after kissing hands; whereupon the audience dispersed amid strains of martial music and popular acclamations.

Upon the 18th, there assembled in the Duomo a still more numerous and distinguished auditory; when, after celebration of mass by the nuncio, he seated himself before the altar, with the Prefect on his right, and the Duke on his left, and in an elegant Latin discourse, set forth the desire of the latter to make sure the succession by adopting his nephew, and the approval of the Pope and college of cardinals to that substitution, in evidence of which the brieves and other formal documents were read. A magnificent missal,—perhaps that painted for Matthew Corvinus King of Hungary, which adorns the Vatican Urbino Library,—was then placed in the hands of Francesco Maria, opened at a miniature of the holy sacrament, and upon it deputies from the communities of the duchy took the oath of fidelity and homage to him as their future sovereign; all which having been regularly attested in notorial instruments, the solemnity ended.[*20]

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These events served to aggravate the jealousy of the Venetians against the claims of Julius upon their recent acquisitions of Romagna, which they regarded as fairly conquered from Borgia. They possessed in this way the states of Ravenna, Faenza, and Rimini, and had gained footing upon the territories of Imola, Forlì, and Cesena, the inhabitants of which loudly complained of their aggressions. Of all these places the Church was the acknowledged superior, and the old investitures held under her by their respective princely families had been annulled by Alexander, in order to make way for his son. Some of these dynasties had died out, and Julius showed no disposition to restore the others, his leading object being the temporal aggrandisement of the papacy. At this juncture his Holiness sent for Guidobaldo, to consult with him; and in order to facilitate his arrival, presented him with a commodious litter swung between two beautifully dappled horses. The winter journey was, however, disastrous to his dilapidated frame, and he was laid up for nine days at Narni with gout, complicated by fever and dysentery, and consequently did not reach Rome with his nephew and Castiglione until the 2nd of January, when they slept outside of the gate, and next morning made a solemn entrance. It was the great object of the Republic to be received as vicar or vassal of the Holy See in the three first-mentioned states, and for this end they were willing to abandon all claims and attempts upon the remaining three. Guidobaldo, interposing as a mediator to prevent an open breach between parties so mutually deserving of his friendship, persuaded the Signory to abandon the latter places, and trust to the justice of Julius for the fulfilment of their desires. To procure this, they sent, in April, a splendid embassy to Rome of eight commissioners, with two hundred attendants, headed by Bembo, who, passing by Urbino, received from the Duchess a princely welcome. But no benefit accrued-39- from this measure, for the Pontiff's ultimatum was announced to the senate through Louis XII., giving them Rimini and Faenza, during his life only, a result highly unsatisfactory to the Republic.

The Duke's prolonged residence in Rome, where his company became greatly prized by the Pope, was little relished by his consort or his people; so, to maintain them in good humour, his Holiness announced a plenary indulgence for all their broken vows and deeds of violence during the late usurpation, to such as should devoutly observe the Easter ceremonies. The alms collected at this jubilee, amounting to 2265 florins, were expended upon the duomo of Urbino. At length, in the end of July, 1506, he obtained leave to return home, on the plea that change of air was advisable for his health.[*21]

Julius, having announced to the consistory his intention of extending the temporal sovereignty of the Church over such portions of the ecclesiastical territory as were possessed by tyrants (for so he called the vicars and other lords who ruled their petty states as feudatories of the Holy See), carried his design into effect with characteristic energy. He set out for Perugia on the 26th of August, after having directed the Duke of Urbino and his nephew to march thither, each with two hundred men-at-arms, and expel its seigneur Gianpaolo Baglioni. Here Guidobaldo again appeared as mediator, and, persuaded by him to submit with good grace to a fate that he could not avert, the Lord of Perugia gave up his fortresses, and was taken into the pay of Julius for his expedition against Bologna. The Pope, elated by the ease with which so formidable an opponent had been disposed of, pressed on preparations for attacking the Bentivoglii. He reached Urbino on the 25th of September, accompanied by twenty-two cardinals, with a suitable cortège, and a guard of four-40- hundred men. Beyond the walls he was received by forty-five noble youths, dressed in doublets and hose of white silk, who, on his alighting, seized as their perquisite his richly caparisoned mule, which was afterwards redeemed from them for sixty golden ducats. The gates were thrown down to receive him, and he was there met by the Duke, disabled from dismounting; by the magistracy, who presented the keys; and by the court and clergy. A rich canopy shaded him, as the holy sacrament was borne before him to the cathedral; and after devotion there, he entered the palace, which next evening was illuminated, along with the citadel, fireworks being displayed in the piazza. Some singular usages of hospitality were adopted on this occasion. The Duke presented to his Holiness a hundred sacks of flour, as much barley and corn, with a proportionate quantity of live stock and poultry, to the value in all of 800 ducats.[*22] This donative was accepted, and part of it was handed over to the hospital of the Misericordia. In anticipation of the Pope's advent, the roads were repaired and smoothed, triumphal arches and statues were erected, flowers and evergreens were strewn before him, the streets were adorned with gay hangings and shaded by linen awnings, the palace was arrayed in those rich tapestries, pictures, and furniture, which the taste of Federigo and his son had accumulated. Next evening, the palace roofs and the citadel were illuminated, and over the latter was hung a brilliant cross of fire. Deputations arrived from Pesaro, and the principal places in the duchy, with gifts of provisions; but large supplies had been previously laid in by the Duke for so vast an influx; and in order to regulate prices, the following tariff, calculated at about half the current value, was proclaimed.

On the 29th of the month, his Holiness set out for Bologna, and, avoiding the territory held by the Venetians, reached Cesena on the 2nd of October by mountain tracks through Macerata and S. Leo. Thence he summoned the Bentivoglii to surrender their city to him as its lawful sovereign, and ordered the people on pain of interdict to abandon their cause, and open the gates. These chiefs had made great preparations for defence, but subsequently, on finding themselves deserted by Louis XII., offered terms, to which Julius, elated at the prospect of French succours, would not listen. The war, which promised to be obstinate, passed off in a revolution; for the Bentivoglii, losing heart, made their escape, to the delight of the citizens, who, thus saved from a siege, threw open their gates, and hailed the Pope as their liberator. He made his entry on Martinmas-day, and at once confirmed this favourable impression by abolishing various grievances, and by scattering in the streets 4000 golden scudi bearing the legend "Bologna freed from its tyrant by Julius."[24]-42- The mob showed their zeal by demolishing the palace of their late rulers, one of the most beautiful in Italy, wherein miserably perished many treasures of art; and its ill-fated master and mistress soon after died of broken hearts in Lombardy. But fortune is fickle, and the breath of popular favour still more changeful. Four years and a half from this date the war-cry of "Bentivoglio" again rang through these streets; the same mob strained their brawny sinews to level the citadel which Julius had erected to curb them, and to shatter the colossal statue of him with which Michael Angelo had adorned their piazza; the same Pontiff saved himself from capture, and his legate escaped from the popular fury to fall by the dagger of a friend. Such are the retributions of Him "whose ways are unsearchable, and whose thoughts are past finding out."[25]

The Pope remained until late in February to settle his new conquest, keeping the Duke near him as a friend and counsellor, and on the 3rd of March, in defiance of the inclement season, repeated his visit to Urbino for one day, with a smaller company, while on his return to Rome. His host, after conveying him as far as Cagli on the 5th, pleaded his constitutional malady, and returned home with the Prefect. As this was the period selected by Count Castiglione for portraying the ducal court, it will be well to pause for a little, and consider the representation he has left us of it.

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The Court of Urbino, its manners and its stars.

THE taste for philosophy, letters, and arts, and the patronage of their professors which Cosimo de' Medici and his son Lorenzo the Magnificent had introduced among the merchant-rulers of Florence, were, as we have already seen, adopted by several petty sovereigns of the Peninsula, but chiefly by those in the district of Romagna.[26] Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta was the first to engraft these fruits of peace upon a military despotism, which his restless ambition and fierce temper ever rendered the torment of his neighbours, and the scourge of his people. The d'Este of Ferrara, the Sforza of Pesaro, but, above all, Duke Federigo of Urbino, improving upon his example, had shown how mental cultivation might be brought to modify, or, as the Latin idiom has it, to humanise, without enervating, a martial character. The reign of Guidobaldo was peculiarly favourable to the development of this new and attractive principle; for though enabled partially to sustain the fame in arms which his father had bequeathed him, his feeble health gave him greater opportunity for the cultivation of letters, and for the society of the learned, to which he was naturally partial. Seconded by the sympathies of his estimable Duchess, his palace became a resort of the first literary and political celebrities of the day, who during the few years that succeeded his restoration, diffused over it a tone of refinement elsewhere-44- unrivalled. To fix for the contemplation of posterity those graceful but transient images which flitted across this gay and brilliant society was the pleasing task undertaken by Castiglione,[*27] one of its most polished ornaments.

The title Il Cortegiano,[*28] literally the Courtier, may be appropriately translated, "the mirror of a perfect courtier." The author intended it, to use the words of his preface, "as a portraiture of the court of Urbino, not by the hand of Raffaele or Michael Angelo, but by an inferior artist, whose capacity attains no further than a general outline, without decking truth in attractive colours, or flattering it by skilful perspective."[*29] But laying aside metaphor, he thus accounts for the origin of his undertaking. "After the death of the Lord Guidobaldo of Montefeltro Duke of Urbino, I, with several other knights who had been in his household, remained in the service of Duke Francesco Maria della Rovere, his heir and successor in that state. And as the fragrant influence continued fresh upon my mind of the deceased Duke's virtues, and of the pleasure I had for some years enjoyed in the amiable society of the excellent persons who then frequented his court, I was-45- induced from these reflections to write a treatise of The Courtier. This I accomplished in a few days, with the intention of subsequently correcting the errors incidental to so hasty a composition."

The point which he undertakes is "to state what I consider the courtiership most befitting a gentleman in attendance on princes, whereby he may best be taught and enabled to perform towards them all seemly service, so as to obtain their favour and general applause; to explain, in short, what a courtier in all respects perfect ought to be."[*30]

We cannot here follow the Count into the wide field which he thus indicates, nor is it necessary, since his own work is accessible in several languages. But from various passages we may offer a sketch of the manners approved at the pattern court of Urbino, which will not be deemed misplaced in these pages. The men who figured there were chiefly distinguished in arms or letters. Whilst the former spent their leisure in recollections of war and love, or in the congenial pastimes of the field and the chase, the conversation of the latter was often warped towards scholastic disputation, or tainted by classic pedantry. Such manners have often been described, and their interest has long passed away; but in a society where female influence prevailed, and in an age when female intellect was fruitful in prodigies, it may be well to see what were the graces expected from a palace-dame.[*31]

At the head of a string of common-place endowments we find a noble bearing, an avoidance of affectation, a natural grace in every action. Beauty is considered as most desirable, not indispensable; and its improvement by such artificial means as painting and enamelling the face, extirpating hairs on the eyebrows or forehead, is derided. White teeth and hands are fully appreciated,-46- but their frequent display is censured. A neat chaussure is lauded, especially when veiled by long draperies. In short, natural elegance and the absence of artifice are primary qualifications. A high-born lady must be circumspect even beyond suspicion, avoiding ill-timed familiarity, and all freedom of language verging upon licence; but when casually exposed to discussions tending to pruriency, a modest blush would be becoming, whilst shrinking or prudery might expose her to sneers. Willingly to listen to or repeat slander of her own sex is a fatal error, which will always be harshly construed by men. Her accomplishments and amusements should ever be selected with feminine delicacy, verging upon timidity; her dress chosen in tasteful reference to what is most becoming, but with apparent absence of study. In conversing with men she should be frank, affable, and lively; but modest, staid, and self-possessed, with a nice observance of tact and decorum. Noisy hilarity, a hoyden address, egotism, prolixity, and the unseasonable combination of serious with ludicrous topics are equally objectionable, but most of all affectation. Yet she ought to be witty, capable of varied conversation in literature, music, and painting, skilled in dancing and festive games. Nor should that of a good housewife be wanting to her other qualities. In short, the theory of a paragon lady of the 1500 might equally suit for one of the present day. We should come to a very different conclusion as to her real character, were we to test it by some passages of the Cortegiano, wherein the Duchess Elisabetta, in chastity the mirror of her age, listens approvingly with her courtly dames to long passages of prurient twaddle, ever skirting and often overstepping the limits of decency. Nor were the morals around her conformable to her own pure example, and that of the immaculate Emilia Pia.[*32] One sad instance in-47- the ducal family we shall have to note, while narrating the early life of Duke Francesco Maria I.; another, remarkable from the subsequent status of the personage to whose birth the scandal attaches, will immediately be mentioned in connection with Giuliano de' Medici.[33]

But it would not be just, after adorning our narrative with flattering sketches from Castiglione's pencil, to exclude one or two anecdotes of the manners actually permitted among the polished society he professes to portray, although their coarseness and vulgarity, scarcely redeemed by their humour, may be considered as staining our pages. They occur in some memorials of the conversation of Francesco Maria, noted by a contemporary from personal observation.[34]

The subject of discussion happening to be Mark Antony's weakness in permitting Cleopatra to accompany him to the fight of Actium, the Duke said, "My father-in-law, the Marquis of Mantua, being at Mortara, in the service of France, Ludovico il Moro was in the camp with his Duchess, and one day, seeing the Marquis suffering from violent pain in the shoulder, said to him, 'Sir, I have the Duchess here, what shall I do with her?' The Marquis, being otherwise occupied, and suffering great pain, replied, 'How can I tell? send her to a brothel!' an answer quite off-hand, and truly appropriate"—from the brother of our paragon Duchess Elisabetta.

Niccolo de' Pii, a condottiere in the service of the Duke's father, was very fat and overgrown. Dining one day with some Spanish officers, after finishing a trout, he sent the head and back-bone to one of them called Pedrada,-48- who thereupon caustically retorted, "It is yourself that has more want of head than of stomach," a reply applauded as most cutting, for, "having more size than sense, he needed the brains rather than the belly." The same Spaniard one day, at a cardinal's reception, began to eat a candle, which, though apparently of wax, was in the centre of tallow; finding it greasy between his teeth, he seized the candlestick, and dashed it on the floor, muttering, "I swear to God it is not silver:" the candle being counterfeit, he fancied the candlestick must needs be so too. When talking of absent men, the Duke told these anecdotes of Ottaviano Fregoso, a star of the Urbino circle. As he conversed with his aunt Duchess Elisabetta, holding her hand, his mind wandered to other matters, and he began to twist about her fingers as he would have done a switch, finally thrusting one of them into his nose, when a burst of laughter from the bystanders recalled his thoughts. Dining one day at the table of Julius II., he sheathed and unsheathed his poignard, jingling the handle, until the Pope, losing all temper, exclaimed, "Begone to a brothel, pox take you! Be off, and the devil go with you!" Whereupon Signor Ottaviano began to make humble excuses for his natural defect of recollection, to the infinite glee of many church dignitaries who witnessed the scene. Yet only two days thereafter, chancing to converse in the papal antechamber with an ambassador who wore a massive gold chain, he, in a fit of abstraction, thrust his finger into one of the links. Just then, his Holiness appearing, the courtiers drew aside to make way, and Fregoso was dragged along, throwing them all into confusion; nor could he get free until he had well "salivated" his finger. Yet when his wits were not a wool-gathering, this was considered the most finished gentleman in Italy, and the most ready in reply. Thus, his uncle, Duke Guidobaldo appearing one day in a violet satin jerkin of unexceptionable fit, Ottaviano exclaimed,-49- "My Lord Duke, you really are the handsome Signor!" "How disgusting are dull flatterers who thus openly display their adulation," was the stinging reply. "My Lord Duke," rejoined the courtier, "I meant not to say that you are a man of worth, though I pronounced you a fine man and a handsome nobleman;" an answer which made the Duke wince, and brought credit to its author.

But enough of this gossip: the reader of the Cortegiano, and its author's charming letters, will find there many more attractive and not less veracious touches of the Montefeltrian court, where learning and accomplishment were often called upon to give dignity and grace to social pastimes. Thus, the Duchess is represented as singing to her lute those verses from the fourth Æneid, in which, at the moment of self-immolation, Dido apostrophised the garments forgotten by her faithless lover when he fled from her charms, until, Orpheus-like, she had wiled the savage animals from their lairs, and set the stones in sympathetic movement. At her court there were no lack of pens to clothe in verse the passing fancies of the hour, and adapt them to the musical or melodramatic tastes which gave a tone of refinement to its amusements. Thus, for the carnival of 1506, Castiglione and his messmate Cesare Gonzaga composed the pastoral eclogue of Tirsis, which was acted by them before the court, with choruses and a brilliant moresque dance. The personages of the dialogue are Iola (Castiglione) and Dameta (Gonzaga), who describe to Tirsi, a stranger shepherd, the ducal circle of Urbino, with the Duchess at its head as goddess of the river Metauro. The Moresca, so named from its supposed Moorish origin, was perhaps borrowed from the ancient Pyrrhic dance, and consisted in a sort of mock fight, performed to the sound of music with measured tread, and blunted poignards. Next spring a somewhat similar pastoral, from the pen of Bembo, was recited by him and Ottaviano Fregoso to the same audience.

-50-

Such and such-like were the favourite court diversions of Urbino. Their stately conceits and solemn pedantry suited the spirit of that classic age and the genius of a pomp-loving people; but it would be scarcely fair to regard them as fully embodying the tone of manners prevalent in the palace of Guidobaldo. In it were harmoniously mingled the opposite qualities which then predominated at the various Italian courts. Scholastic pretensions, still esteemed in many of them, here thawed before the easier address of the new school. Those abstruse studies which the Medici had brought into vogue were eclipsed by a galaxy of brilliant wits. Even the ruthless bearing of the old condottieri princes mellowed under the charm of female tact, while the sensual splendour indulged by recent pontiffs was chastened by the exemplary demeanour of the ducal pair.

Our appreciation of this picture would, however, scarcely be correct or complete, did we not bear in mind the inner life of contemporary sovereigns. We need not dwell on the contrasts afforded in other Peninsular capitals, for these were rather of degree than character, and would only show us the prevalence here of a gentler courtesy and more pervading refinement. But we may fairly compare the palace-pastimes of Urbino with those held in acceptance by the princes and peerage of northern states, where deep potations dulled the senses, or brutalised the temper; where intellect rarely sought a more refined gratification than the monotonous recital of legendary adulation; and where wit was monopolised by dwarfs and professional jesters. In order better to preserve the form and fashion of this pattern for princes, we shall transfer to our pages, from Castiglione's groupings, some outlines of its chief ornaments, beginning with himself.[35]

From Castiglione, in Lombardy, sprang the ancestry-51- of Count Baldassare, and among them were numbered not a few names of note in church and state. His father was no mean soldier, in times when the captains of Italy bore a European reputation; his mother, a Gonzaga of the Mantuan house, was descended from the haughty Farinato degli Uberti, who, when accosted by Dante in The Vision,—

The Count was born at Casatico, in the Mantuese, on the 6th of December, 1478.[*36] His education, besides including the various studies and accomplishments usual to an Italian gentleman of the fifteenth century, was specially directed to those classical attainments which entered into the literary pursuits of the age. The death of his father left him early master of a handsome patrimony, and he at once embraced that courtier-life for which he was peculiarly fitted,—a life, which in a land subdivided into petty sovereignties, constituted the only profession open to civilians of noble birth and distinguished endowments, and on which his pen was destined to confer perpetual illustration. After a brief visit to Milan,[*37] and a short campaign in Naples with his relative the Marquis Francesco of Mantua, he repaired to Rome in 1503, where, by discretion and winning address,-52- he quickly gained the new Pontiff's favour. In Count Castiglione, the penetration of Julius recognised a fit instrument for promoting his favourite scheme of securing Urbino to his nephew Francesco Maria della Rovere; and by attaching him to Guidobaldo, he fixed at that court a friend whose influence was certain to extend itself, and whose example would benefit his youthful relation.

The court of Urbino had already been for half a century the brightest star in the constellation of Italian principalities, and under its fostering influence were fully developed those fine qualities which nature and early training had formed in Castiglione. His first essay was as captain of fifty men-at-arms, with 400 ducats of nominal pay, besides allowances; and his earliest exploit in this new service was the reduction of Forlì, in 1504. The finances of Guidobaldo were necessarily at a low ebb, and it is amusing to find Baldassare's frequent lamentations to his mother, over the arrears of his pay:—"Our doings are jolly but inconsiderable, that is, on small means; we have never yet seen a farthing, but daily and most devoutly look for some cash." It was not, however, till nearly a year later that he received twenty-five ducats to account, having often in the interval asked her aid, representing himself as penniless, and living upon credit. In 1509,[*38] after returning from his mission to England, which peculiarly required the graces of a finished cavalier, and of which some account will be found in II. of the Appendix, he attached himself to the Duke's immediate person during the brief remainder of his life, and when it closed, was sent to Gubbio, to maintain the interests of the succession, in event of any popular outbreak. The favour which he had enjoyed from Guidobaldo was amply continued under his nephew, whose fortunes he followed during several years, sharing his successes in the field, and-53- sustaining him under his disgrace at the pontifical court. These events must, however, be here touched with a flying pen, that we may not anticipate details on which we shall afterwards have to dwell. His reward was a grant of Novillara, near Pesaro; and when Francesco Maria had exchanged sovereignty for exile, he returned to the service of his natural lord, the Marquis of Mantua, whom he long represented at the court of Leo X. To this Pontiff, Baldassare had nearly become related, by a marriage with his niece Clarice de' Medici, which was greatly promoted by Giuliano, during their residence at Urbino. The negotiation was, however, broken off in January, 1509, by the intrigues of her aunt, Lucrezia Salviati, who persuaded her uncle, the Cardinal Giovanni, that, by bestowing her hand upon Filippo Strozzi, he would strengthen the interest of his family at Florence. The match having been, according to Italian usage, an interested arrangement, its dissolution was borne with great philosophy by the intended bridegroom; who some seven years later married Ippolita, daughter of Count Guido Torelli, a celebrated condottiere, by Francesca, daughter of Giovanni Bentivoglio, Lord of Bologna.[*39] The ceremony was performed at Mantua, and was celebrated with tournaments and pompous shows, in which the court and people took a lively interest. But their happy union was of brief duration. The Countess died four years after, in childbed of a daughter. Her name has been embalmed in a beautiful Latin ode, wherein her husband embodied those laments for his absence which he doubtless had often heard from her lips, expressing all the tenderness of nuptial love, and adorning a woman's pathos with a poet's fire. Nothing can be more beautiful than the allusion to her husband's portrait:—

In her epitaph, the Count summed up his wife's character and endowments, with a doubt whether her beauty or her virtue were more remarkable; to which her eulogist, Steffano Guazzo, has added a third grace—her learning. During the first anguish of widowhood he was supposed to have turned his thoughts to ecclesiastical orders; but whatever views of that nature he may have entertained were speedily abandoned; and in 1523 we find him again in Lombardy, with his gallant company, under the banner of the Gonzagas.

On the accession of Clement VII., the Marquis of Mantua again sent him to represent his interests at Rome, where he was not long in obtaining from the new Pope the same favour which he had enjoyed under his uncle, Leo X. His diplomatic talents were now acknowledged as of the first order; and Clement, foreseeing, perhaps, the impending difficulties of his position with the Emperor, prevailed upon Castiglione to accept the nomination of nuncio to Madrid. His courtly qualities were not less agreeable to Charles V. and the grandees of Spain than they had been in Italy; and in the romantic project by which the Emperor proposed to decide in single combat his unquenchable rivalry with Francis I., the Count was selected as his second,—an honour which his diplomatic functions prevented his accepting. Even while the troops and name of Charles were used by Bourbon to inflict upon the Apostolic See the greatest blow which its capital had suffered since the temporal power of the Church rose on the ruins of the Roman empire, the Nuncio was receiving new honours at Madrid, and was only pre-55-vented by his own scruples from obtaining the temporalities of the bishopric of Avila, one of the richest in Spain. In this most delicate position he retained the confidence of his master, who seems to have been satisfied that to no remissness on his part were owing the horrors of the sack of Rome. But these miserable results of jealousies between the Pope and the Emperor, which all his tact and influence were powerless to remove, rendered his position anything but enviable, and appear to have preyed alike upon mind and body. He sank under a short illness at Toledo, on the 2nd of February, 1529,[*40] and was lamented by Charles as "one of the best knights in the world." A letter of condolence, written to his mother by Clement, affords ample evidence that the fruitless results of his diplomacy in Spain had nowise diminished the Pope's confidence in his good service and attachment to his person.

In the Cortegiano of Castiglione we are furnished with an elaborate, and in the main faithful, delineation of the men, the manners, and the accomplishments which rendered the court of Urbino a model for his age, and also with an interesting picture of the immediate circle which Guidobaldo and his estimable Duchess formed around them. We have drawn upon it amply for this portion of our volumes, but the notices which it affords of the Duke are of the most vague and disappointing character. This deficiency would be of little consequence, did the accounts which the same author has left in a Latin letter to Henry VIII. do full justice to his early patron. But from one whose opportunities of collecting ample and authentic particulars were unusual, the passing allusions to many momentous incidents are truly unsatisfactory. His details of scholarship and accomplishments would be more valuable, if divested of an air of exaggeration which even solemn asseverations of veracity scarcely remove. With-56- all their faults, these are preferable to the compilation of Bembo, to which we shall in due time more particularly advert. Those who wade through its laboured and redundant expletives will probably come to the conclusion that Castiglione has preserved whatever they contain worthy of notice.

The Count was a finished gentleman, in an age when that character included a variety of mental acquirements, as well as many personal accomplishments. His verses in Latin and Italian breathe a fine spirit of poetry; his letters merit a distinguished place as models of correspondence; his diplomatic address was highly approved by the sovereigns whom he served, as well as by those to whom he was accredited; he has been complimented as the delight of his contemporaries, the admiration of posterity.

Giuliano de' Medici was third son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and was known in the circle of Urbino by the same appellation. Born in 1478, he passed at that court several years of his family's exile from Florence; nor was he ungrateful for the splendid hospitality he there enjoyed, for, while he lived, his influence with his brother, Leo X., averted those designs against the dukedom, which were directed to his own aggrandisement. After the restoration of the Medici, Leo confided to him the government of Florence, which he endeavoured to administer in the spirit of his father, and succeeded in gaining the good will of the people. But the Pope was not satisfied with the re-establishment of his race as sovereigns of that republic; and the fine qualities and vast ideas of Giuliano suggested him as a fit instrument of further grasping schemes. To realise these, Leo coquetted between France and Spain, and, like his predecessors, sacrificed the peace of Italy. The prizes which he successively proposed for Giuliano, who, by resigning Florence into the hands of his nephew Lorenzo, the heir-male of his house, was free to-57- accept whatever sovereignty might be had, were the duchy of Milan, a state in Eastern Lombardy and Ferrara, or the crown of Naples. In June, 1515, the Pontiff conferred on him the insignia of gonfaloniere and captain-general of the Church; but he was prevented from active service by a fever which cut him off in the following March, when only thirty-eight, not without suspicion of poison at the hands of his nephew Lorenzo. His name is enshrined in Bembo's prose and Ariosto's verse, whilst his tomb by Michael Angelo in the Medicean Chapel, which Rogers, with a quaint but happy antithesis, calls "the most real and unreal thing which ever came from the chisel," is one of the glories of art.[*41] Shortly before his death he had married Filiberta of Savoy, whose nephew, Francis I., created him Duke of Nemours, and, had his life been prolonged, would probably have aided him to further aggrandisement.

During his residence at Urbino, from an intrigue with Pacifica Brandani, a person of high rank or base condition, for both extremes have been conjectured to account for the mystery, there was born to him a son, who, after being exposed in the streets in 1511, was sent to the foundling hospital, and baptized Pasqualino. Removed to Rome and acknowledged in 1513, the child received an excellent education; and under the munificent patronage of the Medici became Cardinal Ippolito, whose tastes were more for arms than mass-books, and whose handsome features and gallant bearing, expressive of his splendid character, are preserved to us in the Pitti Gallery by the gorgeous tints of Titian, alone worthy of such a subject.

The next personage of this goodly company was-58- Cesare Gonzaga, descended from a younger branch of the Mantuan house, and cousin-german of Count Baldassare, whose quarters he shared in 1504, when they returned together from the reduction of Valentino's strongholds in Romagna, where he had the command of fifty men-at-arms. We know little of him beyond his having been a knight of St. John of Jerusalem, and ambassador from Leo X. to Charles V.[*42] Baldi describes him as not less distinguished by merit than blood, and Castiglione assigns him a prominent place in the lively circle whose amusements he depicts. He was no unsuccessful devotee of the muses: a graceful canzonet by him is preserved in the Rime Scelte of Atanagi, and he shares the credit of the eclogue of Tirsis already alluded to, and printed among the works of Castiglione. Recommended by military talent, as well as by diplomatic dexterity and business habits, he remained in the service of Duke Francesco Maria during his early campaigns; and in September, 1512, after reducing Bologna to obedience of the Pope, died there of an acute fever in the flower of his age.

The brothers Ottaviano and Federigo Fregoso were of a Genoese family, who for above a century had distinguished themselves in the military, naval, and civil service of their country, and had given several doges to that republic. Their father, Agostino Fregoso, had married Gentile, natural daughter of Duke Federigo, and the young men were consequently much brought up at the court of Urbino, where their sisters Margherita and Costanza were long in attendance on Duchess Elisabetta. In 1502, Ottaviano accompanied his uncle on his first return from Venice, and we have seen him then defending-59- S. Leo during a lengthened siege, sustained with great gallantry and skill. For that good service he had from the Duke the countship of Sta. Agatha in the Apennines, afterwards confirmed to him by an honourable brief of Leo X., and continued to his descendants, with the title of Vicar, until their extinction in the third generation.

The latter period of Ottaviano's life was actively passed in his native city. From 1512 his endeavours were directed to abolish the French domination maintained at that time by aid of the Adorni, long hereditary rivals of his family. In this he finally succeeded, and next year was elected doge, the only one, in Litta's opinion, "who gloriously manifested a desire for the public weal." He held that dignity during two years of tranquillity to his country, over which the benign influence of his mild and impartial sway diffused a temporary calm, long unknown to its factious inhabitants. So obvious were these beneficial results, that Francis I., on becoming master of Genoa in 1515, continued to him a delegated authority as its governor. But, seven years later, the restless Adorni, having adhered to the Emperor, aided the Marquis of Pescara to carry the city, with an army of imperialists, who mercilessly sacked it. Ottaviano remained a prisoner in the enemy's hands, and died soon after. He is called in the Cortegiano "a man the most singularly magnanimous and religious of our day, full of goodness, genius, prudence, and courtesy; a true friend to honour and virtue, and so worthy of praise that even his enemies are constrained to extend it to him." The revolution effected by Andrea Doria, in 1528, forcibly closed the feuds of these rival families, which, during a century and a half, had outraged public order, and, both being compelled to change their name, the Fregosi adopted that of Fornaro.

Federigo Fregoso, the younger brother of Ottaviano, born in 1480, was educated for holy orders under the eye-60- of his maternal uncle Guidobaldo. In the lettered society of Urbino he perfected himself in various accomplishments, as well as in a thorough knowledge of the world, which enabled him afterwards to acquit himself usefully and creditably in many diversified spheres of action. It was to the great satisfaction of that court that in April, 1507, Julius II. conferred upon him the archbishopric of Salerno, a benefice which the opposition of Ferdinand II., founded on his leaning to French interests, apparently prevented him from enjoying. His life of literary ease remained uninterrupted until his brother's elevation as doge of Genoa in 1513, when he hastened to support him by his counsels and influence. During the next nine years he alternately commanded the army of the republic, led her fleet against the Barbary pirates, whom he annihilated in their own harbours, and represented her as ambassador at the papal court. The revolution of 1522 compelled him to fly from his native city, and, taking refuge in France, he received protection and preferment from Francis I. He returned to Italy in 1529, and was appointed to the see of Gubbio, where his piety, and devotion to the spiritual and temporal welfare of his flock, were equally commendable, and gained him the appellation of father of the poor and refuge of the distressed. A posthumous imputation of heretical error cast upon his name had no better foundation than the accident of his discourse upon prayer happening to be reprinted along with a work of Luther, which occasioned their being both consigned to the Index. In 1539 he was made cardinal by Paul III., and died at Gubbio two years after. His attainments in philology were eminent, including a profound knowledge of Hebrew, with the study of which he is said to have consoled his exile in France. Equal cultivation might have gained him much fame as a poet, but the works he has left are chiefly of a doctrinal character, and his eminence in the literary circle of his day-61- rests more upon the correspondence of Bembo, Sadoleto, and Cortesio than upon his own writings.[*43] By the first of these, the sparkle of his measured wit, the general moderation and suavity of his manners, his gentle consideration for other men's habits, his personal accomplishments, and the zeal displayed in his studies, are all spoken of with warm admiration. The following letter of sympathy, addressed to the dowager Duchess by that rhetorician is an interesting though mannered tribute to his long friendship:—

Pietro Bembo[*44] was born at Venice in 1470, and had the first rudiments of education at Florence, whither his father Bernardo was sent as ambassador from the Signory. Having learned Greek at Messina under Constantin Lascaris, and studied philosophy at Padua and Ferrara, he devoted himself to literary pursuits. At the court of the d'Este princes, where he was introduced by his father then resident as envoy from Venice, he met with the considera-63-tion due to his acquirements, and found a brilliant society, including Sadoleto, the Strozzi, and Tibaldeo. There he was residing when the arrival of Lucrezia Borgia threatened to establish for it a very different character; but the dissolute beauty seems to have left in the Vatican her abandoned tastes, and adopting those of her new sovereignty she became distinguished as a patroness of letters. The intimacy which sprang up between this princess and Bembo has given rise to some controversy as to the purity of its platonism, a discussion into which we need not enter. The life of the lady, the writings of the Abbé, and the morals of their time combine to justify suspicion, where proofs can hardly be looked for.[*45]

Their correspondence lasted from 1503 to 1516, and many of his letters are published.[*46] The prevailing tone of these is rhetorical rather than passionate, and is quite as complimentary to her virtues as to her beauty. The Ambrosian Library at Milan possesses nine autograph epistles in Italian and Latin from Lucrezia, addressed "to my dearest M. Pietro Bembo," with the dates supplied in his hand. A tress of fair auburn hair, originally tied up with them, and doubtless that of the Princess, is now shown in the adjoining museum. That her tastes and accomplishments were not unworthy of such a friendship appears from many dedications of works to her while Duchess of Ferrara, including the Asolani of her admirer.

In 1505 Bembo repaired to Urbino, and sojourned chiefly at that court during the next six years, where his-64- varied attainments were highly prized, and where his philological pedantry was probably regarded as ornamental. Besides enjoying the converse of many congenial spirits, he there formed a friendship with Giuliano de' Medici, to which he owed many subsequent honours. Accompanying him to Rome in 1512, he was recommended by him to his brother, the Cardinal, whose first act on being chosen Pope in the following year, was to name Bembo his secretary, jointly with his friend Sadoleto. For this situation he was in many respects well fitted, by the happy union of great learning with an extensive knowledge of men and manners, which his residence at Ferrara and Urbino had not failed to impart. The laxity of his morals, and the paganism of his ideas, were unfortunately no disqualifications under Leo X. He continued to earn his master's confidence in the discharge of his regular duties, as well as in occasional diplomatic missions, but, as Roscoe truly observes, his success as a negotiator did not equal his ability in official correspondence. The pensions and benefices which rewarded his services enriched him for life, and even before that Pontiff's death he sought at Padua an elegant literary retirement, refusing from Clement VII., and from the Signory of Venice, all offers of public employment. He surrounded himself with a most select library, including many invaluable manuscripts, and a precious collection of medals and other antiquities, which, with the society of the learned whom he attracted to his board, gave to his house a wide celebrity. It was not regarded as at all degraded by the presence of an avowed mistress at its head, with whom he openly lived for many years, and had several children; and neither this scandal, nor the gross indecency of some of his writings, prevented Paul III. from conferring upon him a scarlet hat in 1539. He is said to have accepted this dignity unwillingly, but having done so, he had the good sense at all events to "cleanse the outside of the cup and platter." His mistress was now dead; he laid aside-65- poetry, literature, and pagan idioms, and, devoting himself to theological studies, at which he had formerly sneered in the habit of an abbé, he entered holy orders at the mature age of sixty-nine. In 1541 he succeeded Fregoso, his early companion at Urbino, in the bishopric of Gubbio, to which was added that of Bergamo. How little these preferments contributed to his comfort appears from a letter to Veronica Gambara in December, 1543. "Often," he there says, "do I desire to be the unfettered Bembo of other days, rather than as I now am. But what better can one make of it? Man's existence, abounding more in crosses than in gratifying incidents, will have it so; and wiser he who least desponds and best puts up to necessity, than one that less conforms to it. Yet I own myself unable to do this amid these privations, and exiled in a manner from myself. For verily I am neither at Venice nor Padua, as your Ladyship supposes, but at my church of Gubbio, a very wild place to say the truth, and offering few conveniences." He died at Rome six years after, in his seventy-seventh year, and was buried in the church of the Minerva, between his patrons Leo X. and Clement VII., where a modest flag-stone is all the memorial that his natural son and heir, Torquato, bestowed on one of the most famous men of his age.

At the town of Bibbiena, in the upper Val d'Arno, there were born about 1470, of humble parentage, two brothers, whose business talents procured them remarkable advancement. The elder, Pietro Dovizi, became a secretary of Lorenzo de' Medici, into whose family he introduced his brother Bernardo. There this youth gained for himself so good a reputation, that he was allowed to share the instructions bestowed upon his patron's younger son Giovanni. A close intimacy gradually sprang up between these fellow students, which the similarity of their talents, their tastes, and their pursuits ripened into lasting friend-66-ship. Identifying himself with the Medici, he followed their fortunes into exile, and attended Giuliano to Urbino, where he was received with the welcome there extended to all who, like him, combined the scholar and the gentleman. But this hospitality met with a very different return from these two guests. Of Giuliano's generous forbearance to second the evil designs of his brother, the Pope, against the state which had sheltered him, we have lately spoken. When we come to narrate the usurpation of the duchy by the Medici in 1516-17, we shall find in command of their invading army

and who had adopted that town as a substitute for his own undistinguished patronymic. This ingratitude was the more odious if, as it was probable, he owed to Guidobaldo, or his nephew, the favour of Julius II., who first brought him forward in the public service.

At that Pontiff's death he was acting as secretary to his early friend, the Cardinal de' Medici, and in that capacity was admitted to the conclave. The intrigues which there effected his patron's election have given rise to various anecdotes and controversies, which we pass by with the single remark that, by all accounts, the address of Dovizi was not unimportant to the success of Leo X. In return, he was included in the first distribution of scarlet hats as Cardinal Bibbiena. In this enlarged sphere his talents and tastes had full room for exercise. He was selected for various important diplomatic trusts, besides filling the offices of treasurer and legate in the war of Urbino. With his now ample means, his patronage of letters and arts had ample scope, and he was regarded as the Maecenas of a court rivalling that of Augustus. Raffaele enjoyed his particular regard, which he would willingly have proved by bestowing on him the hand of his niece.

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His ambition is alleged to have exceeded even the rise of his fortunes, and to have prompted him to contemplate, and possibly to intrigue for, his own elevation to the chair of St. Peter, in the event of a vacancy. His sudden death in 1520, soon after a residence of above a year as legate to Francis I. (who had conferred upon him the see of Constance), when coupled with such reports, was construed as the effect of poison administered by Leo. Indeed, his friend, Ludovico Canossa, observed that it was a received dogma among the French at that very time that every man of station who died in Italy was poisoned. But such vague conjectures, however specious under Alexander VI., are less credible in other pontificates; and if the Cardinal were poisoned, that practice was then by no means limited to popes. He was an accomplished dilettante when the standards of beauty were of pagan origin; and his intimacy with Raffaele dated after the painter's Umbrian inspirations had faded before a gradual homage to the "new manner." Like his friend Bembo, his morals were epicurean to the full licence of a dissolute age. His famed comedy of the Calandra,[*47] which was brought out at Urbino in 1508, and which gave full play to his exquisite sense of the ridiculous, justifies this charge, and all that we have so often to repeat of the laxity then prevalent in the most refined Italian circles. A notice of this, the only important production of his pen, and an account of its being magnificently performed before Guidobaldo, will be found in our twenty-fifth chapter. Those who regard the pontificate of Leo X. as the classic-68- period of Italian letters must feel grateful to Cardinal Bibbiena for developing a portion of its lustre; the sterner moralist, who brands its vices, will charge him with pandering freely to the licence of a court of which he was a notable ornament. Castiglione tells us that an acute and ready genius rendered him the delight of all his acquaintance; and Baldi adds, that by practice in the papal court he so improved that gift, that his tact in business was unrivalled, to which his mild address, and happy talent of seasoning the dullest topics with graceful pleasantry, greatly contributed.

His personal beauty obtained for him the adjunct of bel Bernardo, and he is represented in the Cortegiano as saying, in reference to the amount of good looks desirable for a gentleman, "Such grace and beauty of feature are, I doubt not, mine, in consequence whereof, as you know, so many women are in love with me; but I have some misgivings as to my figure, especially these legs of mine, which, to say the truth, don't seem to me quite what I should like, though I am well enough satisfied with my bust, and all the rest." This, however, having been introduced as a jest, may perhaps be understood rather as complimentary to his person, than as a sarcasm on his vanity.

A contemporary and unsparing pen thus sketches his qualities, in a manuscript printed by Roscoe, from the Vatican archives:—"He was a facetious character, with no mean powers of ridicule, and much tact in promoting jocular conversation by his wit and well-timed jests. He was a great favourite with certain cardinals, whose chief pursuit was pleasure and the chase, for he thoroughly knew all their habits and fancies, and was even aware of whatever vicious propensities they had. He likewise possessed a singular pliancy for flattery, and for obsequiously accommodating himself to their whims, stooping patiently to be the butt of insulting and abusive jokes, and shrink-69-ing from nothing which could render him acceptable to them. He also had much readiness in council, and was perfectly able seasonably to qualify his wit with wisdom, or to dissemble with singular cunning." Bembo, with more partial pen, says in a letter to Federigo Fregoso, "The days seem years until I see him, and enjoy the pleasing society, the charming conversation, the wit, the jests, the features, and the affection of that man."

Among the distinguished literary names which have issued from Arezzo, several members of the Accolti family were conspicuous in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Bernardo,[*48] of whom we are now to speak, had a father noted as a historian, a brother and a nephew who reached the dignity of cardinal, and were remarkable in politics and letters. He obtained from Leo X. the fief of Nepi, as well as various offices of trust and emolument; of these, however, his wealth rendered him independent, enabling him to indulge in a life of literary ease. His poetical celebrity exceeded that of his contemporaries, and seems to have been his chief recommendation at the court of Guidobaldo. There, and at Rome, he was in the habit of reciting his verses in public to vast audiences, composed of all that was brilliant in these cultivated capitals. Nor was his popularity limited to a lettered circle. When an exhibition was announced, the shops were closed, the streets emptied, and guards restrained the crowds who rushed to secure places among his audience. This extraordinary enthusiasm appears the more unaccountable, when we find his printed poetry characterised by a bald and stilted style, which leaves no pleasing-70- impression on the reader. The mystery seems explained by a supposition that his talent lay in extemporary declamation.

Instances are far from uncommon in Italy, of similar effects produced by the improvisatori, whose torrent of melodious words, directed to a popular theme, and accompanied by music and impassioned gesticulation, hurries the feelings of a sympathising auditory to bursts of tumultuous applause, whilst on cool perusal, the same compositions fall utterly vapid on the reader. Be this as it may, the success of Accolti had the common result of superficial powers, and so egregiously inflated his vanity, that he assumed as his usual designation "the unique Aretine," by which he is always accosted in the Cortegiano. Nine years later we find him devoting to Duchess Elisabetta attentions which were attributed to a passion more powerful than gratitude, but which, knowing as he well did, her immaculate modesty, could only have been prompted by despicable vanity, and hence exposed him to keen ridicule.

To few of the pedigrees illustrated by Sansovino is there attributed a more remote origin, or a brighter illustration, than to that of Canossa.[*49] A younger son of the family was Count Ludovico, who, being cousin-german of Castiglione's mother, was perhaps by this means brought to Urbino, and thence recommended to Julius II., under whose patronage he entered upon an ecclesiastical career. From Leo X. he obtained the see of Tricarico, and was sent by him as nuncio to England and France, a service which earned him promotion to the bishopric of Bajus. Adrian VI. and Clement VII. continued him in this post; and during a long residence-71- at the French court, he entirely gained the confidence and favour of Francis I. Many of his diplomatic letters are printed in various collections; and to him is addressed Count Baldassare's curious description of the performance of the Calandra, at Urbino.

Alessandro Trivulzio was nephew of Gian Giacomo, the distinguished Milanese general of that name, and himself a famous captain in the service of Florence, and of Francis I. Sigismondo Riccardi, surnamed the Black, Gasparo Pallavicini, Pietro da Napoli, and Roberto da Bari,—the last of whom died in the camp of Duke Francesco Maria, in 1510,—are mentioned among the military notorieties of the Feltrian court. Giovanni Cristoforo, the sculptor, may be added to the list of its literary dilettanti; and among its musical ornaments were Pietro Monti and Terpandro, with Niccolo Frisio, a German, long resident in the land of song, whose exertions were often in request by Monti and Barletta, both dancers of note.

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SUCH were the eminent men, with whom Guidobaldo is described in the Cortegiano as living in easy but dignified familiarity, joining their improving and amusing conversation, or admiring their dexterity in exercises which his broken constitution no longer permitted him to share. Thus passed the days in the palace; and, when the Duke was constrained by his infirmities to seek early repose, the evenings were spent in social amusements, over which the Duchess gracefully presided, with her ladies Margherita and Costanza Fregoso, the Duke's nieces, Margherita and Ippolita Gonzaga, the Signor Raffaella, and Maria Emilia Pia.

Of the social position of Italian women in this century[*50] we may gather many particulars from Ludovico Dolce's Instituto delle Donne: for although, like most writers on similar themes, he represents them "not as they are, but as they ought to be," still, knowing the then received standard of female perfection, we can form a pretty accurate estimate of their actual qualities. His views as to education are exceedingly orthodox. The Holy Scriptures, with the commentaries of the fathers, Ambrose,-73- Augustin, and Jerome, ought to be day and night before a girl, and suffice for her religious and moral discipline. She should be familiar with her own language and with Latin, but Greek is an unnecessary burden. For mental occu-74-pation, Plato, Seneca, and such other philosophers as supply sound moral training are excellent, as well as Cicero for bright examples and wholesome counsels. History being the teacher of life, all classical historians are commended, but the Latin poets are vetoed as unfit for honest women, except most of Virgil and a few selections from Horace. Many modern Latin writers are commended, especially the Christeida of Sannazaro and Vida, but all such prurient productions in Italian as Boccaccio's novels are to be shunned like venomous reptiles. On the other hand, the poetry of Petrarch and Dante is extolled beyond measure, the former as embodying with singular beauty an instance of the purest and most honourable love, the latter as an admirable portrai-75-ture of all Christian philosophy. Yet such literary occupations should never intrude upon more important matters, such as prayer, nor upon the domestic duties of married women.

It is unnecessary to follow our author into abstract qualities and common-place graces, but the emphasis with which certain things are decried affords a fair presumption of their prevalence. Thus, excessive luxury of dress, and, above all, painting the face and tinging the hair, are attacked as impious attempts to improve upon God's own handiwork. In like manner, the assiduity with which modesty and purity of mind and person are inculcated confirms what we otherwise know of the unbridled licentiousness then widely diffused over society. Gaming of every sort is scouted; music and dancing are set down as matters of indifference.

In regard to marriage, the selection of a husband is left as matter of course to the parents, since a girl is necessarily too ignorant of the world to choose judiciously for herself; a reason resulting from the education and social circumstances of young women in Italy, which sufficiently accounts for this apparent solecism continuing in the present day. A prolix exposition of the principles which ought to guide fathers in their discharge of this delicate duty may be summed up in the very pertinent remark, that few prudent damsels would rather weep in brocaded silks than smile in homely stuffs.

But it is time to return from this digression to the Lady Emilia Pia, who merits more special notice in a sketch of the Montefeltrian court. She was sister of Giberto Pio, Lord of Carpi in Lombardy, and wife of Antonio, natural brother of Duke Guidobaldo. After losing her husband in the flower of youth, she remained at Urbino, and became one of its prime ornaments, not only by her personal attractions, but by a variety of more lasting qualities. The part she sustains in the conversation of-76- the Cortegiano amply evinces the charm which attached to her winning manners, as well as the ready tact wherewith she played off an extent of knowledge and graceful accomplishment rare even in that age of female genius. She was at all times ready and willing to lead or second the learned or sportive pastimes by which the gay circle gave zest to their intercourse and polish to their wit, and thus was of infinite use to the Duchess, whose acquirements were of a less sparkling quality, and of whom she was the inseparable companion. Still more singular and proportionately admired were the decorum that marked her conduct in circumstances of singular difficulty and the virtue which maintained a spotless reputation amid temptations and lapses regarded as venial in the habits of a lax age. Her death occurred about 1530,[*51] and an appropriate posthumous tribute was paid to such graces and virtues in this medallion bearing her portrait, with the Latin motto, "To her chaste ashes," on the reverse. Even the luscious verses in which Bembo and Castiglione sang the seductions of the Feltrian court assumed a loftier tone in their tribute to her heart of adamant, which, "pious by name[52] and cruel by nature," and spurning the designs of Venus upon its wild freedom, would impart its own severity generally to the slaves of the goddess. Yet it was under the guidance of this able mistress of the revels, that joy and merriment supplanted rigorous etiquette in the palace of Urbino, where frankness was restrained from excess by the Duchess' example, and where all were free to promote the common entertainment as their wit or fancy might suggest. Among the sports of these after-supper hours, Castiglione enumerates questions and answers, playful arguments seasoned with smart rejoinders, the invention of allegories and devices, repartees, mottoes, and puns, varied by music and dancing.

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Such was the mode of life described in the Cortegiano, with ample details, which we shall attempt slightly to sketch. The scene is laid in the evenings immediately succeeding the visit of Julius II. The usual circle being assembled in her drawing-room, the Duchess desired Lady Emilia to set some game a-going.[*53] She proposed that every person in turn should name a new amusement, and that the one most generally approved should be adopted.[54] This fancy was sanctioned by her mistress, who delegated to her full authority to enforce it upon all the gentlemen, but exempted the ladies from competition. The courtiers so called upon thus acquitted themselves of their task. Gaspar Pallavicino suggested that each should state the peculiar excellence and special defect which he would prefer finding in the lady of his love. Cesare Gonzaga, assuming that all had some undeveloped tendency to folly, desired that every one should state on what subject he would rather play the fool. Fra Serafino sneeringly proposed that they should successively say why most women hate rats and like snakes. The Unico Aretino, whose turn came next, thought that the party might try one by one to guess at the occult meaning of an ornament, in the form of an S, worn by the Duchess on her forehead. The flattery with which this odd suggestion was spiced, gave a clue to the Lady Emilia, who exclaimed that, none but himself being competent, he ought to solve the mystery; on which, after a pause of apparent abstraction, he recited a sonnet on that conceit, giving an air of impromptu to what was, in fact, a studied composition clumsily introduced. Ottaviano Fregoso wished to know on what point each would be most willing to undergo a lover's quarrel. Bembo, refining on this idea, was of opinion that the question ought to be whether the cause-78- of quarrel had best originate with oneself or with one's sweetheart—whether it was most vexatious to give or receive the offence. Federigo Fregoso, premising his conviction that nowhere else in Italy were there found such excellent ingredients of a court, from the sovereign downwards, proposed that one chosen from the party should state the qualities and conditions required to form A PERFECT COURTIER, it being allowed to the others to object and redargue in the manner of a scholastic disputation.

This idea being approved by the Duchess and her deputy, the latter called upon Count Ludovico Canossa to begin the theme. Its discussion (our observations upon which must be reserved for a future portion of these pages) is represented by Castiglione as having been prolonged during successive evenings; Federigo Fregoso, Giuliano the Magnificent, Cesare Gonzaga, Ottaviano Fregoso, and Pietro Bembo, following the cue with which Canossa had opened. At the close of the fourth sitting, an argument on love was interrupted by daylight. "Throwing open the eastern windows of the palace, they saw the summit of Monte Catri already tipped with rosy tints of the radiant Aurora, and all the stars vanished except Venus, the mild pilot of the sky, who steers along the limits of night and day. From these far-off peaks there seemed to breathe a gentle breeze, that tempered the air with bracing freshness, and, from the rustling groves of the adjacent hills, began to awaken sweet notes of wandering birds." The same golden sun continues to dawn upon Urbino, but, ere many months had passed, the bright galaxy of satellites that circled round Duke Guidobaldo was scattered, for their guiding star had gone to another sphere.

During fifteen years his fine form and robust constitution had been wasted by gout, for such was the name given to a disease hereditary in his family. Physiologists may de-79-cide upon the accuracy of this term, and say why, in an age of incessant exposure to severe exercise under all weather, and when luxuries of the table were little known or appreciated, the ravages of that malady should have been more virulent than in our days of comparative indulgence and effeminacy.[55] At first he struggled against the symptoms, continuing his athletic sports; but in a few years he was reduced to a gentle pace on horseback, or to a litter. At length, about the time of which we are now speaking, his intervals of ease rarely extended to a month, during which he was carried about in a chair; but, when under a fit, was confined to bed in great agony. Yet, ever tended by his wife, his fortitude never forsook him, and his mind, gathering strength in the decay of nature, sought occupation in the converse of those able men who made his palace their home, or, in the moments of most acute suffering, fell back for distraction upon the vast stores of his prodigious memory, whiling away long hours of agony by repeating passages from his favourite authors. The palliations of medicine lost their effects; his enfeebled frame became more and more sensitive to acute pain; in his emaciated figure few could recognise the manly beauty of his youthful person; life had prematurely become to him an irksome burden.

There occurred in Italy at this period a very unnatural change of the seasons. On the 7th of April, 1505, snow fell at Urbino to the depth of a foot, and scarcity prevailed, followed in June by a murrain among cattle. From September, 1506, until January, 1508, it is said that no rain or snow fell, except during a few days of violent torrents in April. The fountains failed, the springs became exhausted, the rivers dried up, grain was hand-ground for want of water. The crops were scarcely worth reaping, the pastures were-80- scorched, and the fruitless vines shrivelled under an ardent sun.[56]

On the other hand, December was turned into July; the orchards bore a second crop of apples, pears, plums, and mulberries, from which were prepared substitutes for wine, then worth a ducat the soma; strawberries and blackberries ripened in the wood-lands, and luxuriant roses were distilled in vast quantities at Christmas. With the new year things underwent a sudden revolution, and January set in with unwonted rigour. The delicacy of the Duke's now reduced frame rendered him peculiarly sensitive to the atmospheric phenomena. The long drought had especially affected all gouty patients, and the severe weather so aggravated his sufferings that, on the 1st of February, he was, by his own desire, removed in a litter to Fossombrone. That town is situated on the north side of the Metauro, lying well to the sun, and little above the sea level, from which it is distant about fifteen miles, and has thus the most genial spring climate in the duchy. At first the change was in all respects beneficial, and revived the hopes of an attached circle who had accompanied the Duchess. But in April winter returned, and with it a relapse into the worst symptoms, which soon carried him off. Although his great sufferings were borne with extraordinary fortitude, he looked forward to death as an enviable release; and when his last hour approached, he regarded it with calm resignation. To his chaplain he confessed, as one whose worldly account was closed; and he acquitted himself of those testamentary duties to his church and to the poor, which his creed considers saving-81- works; directing at the same time the disposal of his body. Then calling to his bedside (where the Duchess and Amelia were in unwearied attendance) his nephew the Lord Prefect, Castiglione, Ottaviano Fregoso, and other dear friends, he addressed to them words of consolation. Their hopes for his recovery he mildly reproved, adapting to himself the lines of Virgil:—

To the Duchess and to his nephew were chiefly addressed his parting injunctions, the object of which was to recommend them to each other's affection and confidence, to comfort them under their approaching bereavement, and to counsel implicit obedience on the part of Francesco Maria towards his uncle the Pope. It seems enough to allude thus generally to his closing scene, for the accounts which we have from Castiglione and Federigo Fregoso, one a spectator, the other a dear friend, who quickly reached the spot, are unfortunately disguised in Ciceronianisms, necessarily inappropriate to a Christian death-bed, and in which the spirit of his words has probably evaporated.[58] We may, however, trust that

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for we have seen him neither indifferent nor neglectful of the observances dictated by his Church, and, ere the vital spark fled, he received its rites and besought the prayers of the bystanders. His passage from mortality was peaceful, and death, which he considered desirable, spread like a gentle slumber over his stiffening limbs and composed features. At midnight of the 11th of April his spirit was released from its shattered tenement.[*59] Over the agonised and uncontrolled lamentations of the Duchess we draw a veil; the description of such scenes must ever degenerate into common-place generalities. She felt and suffered as was natural to the best wives prematurely severed from the most attached of husbands.

Since the Duke's departure to Fossombrone, his state had been administered by the Duchess and Francesco Maria. The former, alive to the duties committed to her, wrote thus to the priors of Urbino, when the danger became imminent.

Upon hearing from Ludovico Canossa that the Duke's illness approached a fatal termination, Julius had, on the 13th, instructed Federigo Fregoso to repair to Fossombrone with his own physician, Archangelo of Siena, and, after administering such aid and consolation as the case might require, to take fit measures for insuring the quiet succession of Francesco Maria della Rovere in the dukedom, and for the interim administration of affairs by the Duchess. But, ere they arrived, mourning had succeeded to suspense, and their sympathies were demanded for the widowed Duchess, who had passed two days since her bereavement in utter despair, refusing food and sleep. So entirely, indeed, were the functions of life suspended, that for some time it was feared the vital spark had followed its better half, and it was very long ere her ghastly and spectral form gradually resumed the aspect of an existence in-84- which all interest was for her gone by, and which, but for the representations of her friends, she would have wished to quit.[*60]

The body was borne on shoulders to Urbino during the following night, surrounded by multitudes carrying torches, their numbers swollen, as they advanced, by influx of the country population through which the funeral cortège passed. Castiglione, who accompanied it, describes the night as one of mysterious dread, in which the wailing of the people ever and anon was broken upon by piercing shrieks echoed from the mountains, and repeated by the distant howling of alarmed watch-dogs. The inhabitants of the capital issued forth to meet the melancholy procession, headed by their clergy, the monastic orders, and the confraternities. In the great hall of the palace the Duke lay in state, during two days, upon a magnificent catafalque with its usual but incongruous decorations of sable velvet, gold damask, and blazing lights. His dress is minutely described by the anonymous diarist as consisting of a doublet of black damask over crimson hose, a black velvet hat over a skull-cap of black taffetas fringed with gold, and black velvet slippers; to which was added the mantle of the Garter, in dark Alexandrine velvet, with a hood of crimson velvet, lined with white silk damask.

But, with that strange blending of opposite feelings which marks the visits of death to regal halls, the mourners were soon summoned from this vision of departed greatness to contribute far other honours to its living representative. One day having been devoted to lament the general loss, the Lord Prefect, Francesco Maria, repaired, with the principal authorities, to the cathedral, and, after solemn mass, published the will, by which his uncle named him heir and successor to his states and dignities, nominating his widow to the regency during-85- the nonage of his heir, and leaving her Castel Durante, with a provision of 14,000 ducats, besides her own dowry of 18,000. During the afternoon succeeding the proclamation of Francesco Maria, he visited the Duchess, who was "transfixed with grief." He was accompanied by a small deputation of citizens, to offer their duty and condolence, and receive her tearful thanks for the happy accomplishment of her husband's testamentary intentions, with entreaties that they would transfer to his successor the loyal affection they had borne to their late sovereign. About four o'clock a funeral service was performed in the great hall, from whence, at eight, the body was conducted by an again mournful host, to remain for the night in the church of Sta. Chiara. Next day it was transported, during continual rain, to the Zoccolantine church, in the groves around which he had been surprised by the first aggression of Cesare Borgia. In its small nave his remains were entombed opposite those of his father; and over both there were subsequently placed two modest monuments in black and white marble, surmounted by busts of the Dukes. The inscription to Guidobaldo is to this effect: "To Guidobaldo, son of Federigo, third Duke of Urbino, who, emulating even in minority his father's fame, maintained his authority with manly energy and success. In youth he triumphed over adverse fortune. Vigorous in mind, although enfeebled by disease, he cultivated letters instead of arms; he protected men of general eminence instead of mere military adventurers; and he ameliorated the commonwealth by the arts of peace, until his court became a model to all others. He died in the year of God MDVIII., of his age XXXVI."

The solemn obsequies befitting sovereign personages, including six hundred masses, were performed on the 2nd of May in the cathedral, which was hung and carpeted with black, and illuminated with five hundred wax-lights. In the nave was an immense cenotaph, decorated with-86- representations of the most important events of the Duke's life, his standards and insignia, with suitable legends, and on the bier, in place of the body, lay his robes of the Garter. The function was attended by the court, five bishops, the clerical dignitaries, with deputies from all parts of the duchy, and most of the Italian states, as well as the principal inhabitants. Before the elevation of the host, a funeral oration was recited by his former preceptor Odasio, in which the wonted wordiness of such compositions is redeemed by a certain fire of eloquence, mellowed by occasional touches of fine sentiment, rendering it the best part of Bembo's compilation regarding Guidobaldo. Its excellence, and the vast concourse of spectators, estimated at ten thousand, contributed to make this the most notable ceremony of the sort then remembered in Italy. On the following day, the oaths of allegiance to the new Duke were taken, and his predecessor was consigned over to history.

The character of the last Montefeltrian Duke need scarcely be told to those who have followed this sketch of his life. Gifted by nature with talents of a very high order, he cultivated them in early youth with an application rare indeed in his exalted rank, and a success which his marvellous memory tended alike to facilitate and to render permanent. In times singularly productive of military heroes and men of letters, he emulated the celebrity of both, and, had health permitted him a prolonged and active career, he might, in the ever-recurring battle-fields of Italy, have equalled the renown left by his father and earned by his successor.

When disabled from the profession of arms, he fell back with fresh zest upon his youthful studies, and drew around him men whose converse harmonised with these tastes. To say that his learning was unequalled among the princes of his day is no mean compliment. His palace became-87- the asylum of letters and arts, over which he gracefully presided. Aldus Manutius, in dedicating to him editions of Thucydides and Xenophon, addressed him in Greek, of which he was so perfect a master as to converse in it with ease. To the latter of these historians the Duke was very partial, calling him the siren of Attica. Among his other favourite classics, Castiglione names Lucian, Demosthenes, and Plutarch; Livy, Tacitus, Quintus Curtius, Pliny, and the Orations of Cicero. Most of these he knew intimately, and recited entire passages without reference to the book. But besides these selected authors, he is said to have made himself acquainted with almost every branch of human knowledge then explored. Nor were religious studies omitted. The history, rites, and dogmas of the Church are mentioned among the topics familiar to his versatile genius; St. Chrysostom and St. Basil were among his chosen books. To enumerate all the contemporary authors who shared his patronage might be irksome, but we shall introduce one letter addressed by him to Paolo Cortesio.

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The great endowments he thus admirably developed were united with a disposition represented as nearly perfect, at all events as exempted from the failings most perilous to princes. The bad passions which opportunity and indulgence have, in all ages, rendered peculiarly fatal to those whose will is law, were almost strangers to his breast. Prone to no vicious indulgences, he was ever kind and considerate, as well as just and clement. He may, in short, be regarded as that rarest of all characters, an unselfish despot,—despot as regarded the possession of absolute power, but not so in its use. The nobility had nothing to dread from his jealousy or his licentiousness; the citizens were spared oppressive imposts; the poor looked up to him as a sympathising protector. In short, we may pronounce him a magnanimous, a most accomplished, and, so far as erring man is permitted to judge, a blameless prince.

Nor was the impression left upon the public mind by the glories of Urbino under Guidobaldo of a transient character. Mocenigo, Venetian envoy at the court of his grand-nephew, thus speaks of him above sixty years after his death:—"Disabled by broken health from active pursuits, he fell upon the project of forming a most brilliant court, filled with eminent men of every profession; and by rendering himself generally popular, with the co-operation of his Duchess, who emulated him in welcoming and entertaining persons of talent, he brought around him a greater number of fine spirits than any sovereign had hitherto been able to attract, and, indeed, gave to all other princes in the world the model and example of an admirably regulated court."

The remaining years of the widowed Duchess were in strict accordance with a picture sketched of her by Bernardo Tasso, in the Amadigi:—

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The circumstances of her wedded life had not been such as to render new ties distasteful to a lady of thirty-seven, described by Bembo as still elegant in figure and dress, beautifully regular in features, and with eyes and countenance of singularly winning expression. The compliment paid to her character, in that author's sketch of the Urbino sovereigns, bears upon it a stamp of truthful earnestness rarely found in his rhetorical periods.[62]

An anonymous and now lost complimentary poem, written about 1512, and formerly in the library of S. Salvadore at Bologna, celebrated Elisabetta's charitable aid in the establishment of a monte di pietà,[63] at Fabriano, and alluded to her prudent government of the state in the Duke's absence. The terms of affection with which she regarded her husband's adopted heir underwent no change after her bereavement; and his marriage to her niece Leonora Gonzaga strengthened the tie. We shall find her making great personal exertions to modify the measures of Leo X. against Francesco Maria; and she shared his confiscation and exile, which she could not avert. She lived, however, to return with him to the-90- house she had twice been compelled to relinquish, and saw his dynasty securely established in the state which had owned her as its mistress.

Her trials were closed on the 28th of January, 1526, by an easy death. She left the residue of her property to Duchess Leonora, after payment of numerous pious bequests to various churches, with liberal legacies to her household; and she was interred by the side of her beloved husband in the church of S. Bernardino.

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WHEN writing upon Italy of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a prominent place must be allotted to letters and arts. At Urbino in particular, their progress was then great, their influence proverbial; and our next eight chapters will contain notices of them which would have interrupted the continuity of our previous narrative.

The reigns of Dukes Federigo and Guidobaldo I. extended over a period which general consent has regarded as the most brilliant in Italian history, and which we have repeatedly named its golden age. High expectations are naturally entertained of literature, arts, and general refinement in a cycle of such pretension. We look for a rapid advance of thought in paths of learning and science whence during long centuries it had been excluded. We anticipate a widely disseminated zeal for classic writers, an eager rivalry to outstrip them in branches of speculative knowledge, which they especially cultivated. We imagine the imitative arts revived under the influence of new and more exquisite standards. And we reckon upon the diffusion of a taste and capacity for enjoying those things among classes hitherto excluded from such intellectual enjoyments. In each of these expectations the student of literary history will be gratified; yet there are several sorts of composition which, if separately examined, offer disappointing results, and scarcely a single work-94- written during the fifteenth century has maintained universal popularity. The explanation is easy. This age was one of unprecedented intellectual activity, when men's minds were devoted to the acquisition of knowledge which they had laboriously to hunt out, and doubtingly to decipher. They had to cut for themselves tracks through an unexplored region, without grammars or commentaries to serve them as guides and landmarks. The toilsome habits thus formed were forthwith exercised for the benefit of subsequent investigators, and were applied to smoothing the path which they had themselves penetrated. Thus was it that the first successful scholars became grammarians and commentators. Surrounded by ample stores of intelligence, they had no occasion to cultivate new germs of thought. Their first object was to secure and render accessible the treasures which antiquity had unfolded to them; their next, to elaborate them in varied forms, to reproduce them in the manner most congenial to their intellectual wants. Thus they became more industrious than original, laborious rather than creative. Again, those who, on entering the garden of knowledge, thought of its fruits rather than of its approaches, instead of seeking the reward of their toils among the fair mazes of poetry and belles lettres, aimed at more arduous rewards, and climbed the loftiest and most slippery branches in search of golden apples. The harvest of scholastic philosophy which they thus gathered in may seem scarcely worthy of the fatigues given to its acquisition; but from the seeds so obtained, cultivated and matured as they have been by many after labourers, a copious and healthful store of intellectual food has been secured for subsequent generations. The work performed by these pioneers of learning and truth was, however, more calculated to crush than to inspire that more elastic fancy which preferred the flowery mead to the tree of knowledge. The spirit of the age was ponderous and prosaic, and the few who attempted to rise above its-95- denser atmosphere into poetic regions were clogged by the trammels of a dead language, and by obsolete associations which they dared not shake off. The fifteenth century was consequently rich in scholars, copious in pedants, but poor in genius, and barren of strong thinkers.

These circumstances necessarily detract from the popular interest of Italian literary history at this important period, all influential to its after destinies, and we mention them in the conviction that general readers must feel disappointed with this portion of our work. The vast mass of materials then created now reposes in the principal storehouses of learning, much of it unpublished, and but a small part rendered accessible in recent editions. As it would be an unprofitable task to labour upon these materials for merely critical purposes, we have for the most part satisfied ourselves with an examination of the authors immediately connected with Urbino; nor shall we be tempted much beyond that narrow limit, by the facility of borrowing from those copious and intelligent writers who have successfully investigated the intellectual progress of Italy.

The revival of civilisation, and its handmaid arts, is a problem so inexplicable on the ordinary principles which regulate human progress,[64]—its causes were so complex, and many of them so remote, and singly so little striking,-96-—that it were, perhaps, vain to hope for a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon. It may be, that the ever revolving cycle of human affairs had brought round a period predestined to intellectual development, or that mind, awakening from the slumber of centuries, possessed the energies of renewed youth. But in a season of universal and sudden progress it is difficult to distinguish between cause and effect,—to decide whether mind aroused liberty, or if freedom was the nurse of intelligence.

The feeble hold which the popes retained over their temporal power during their residence at Avignon, and during the great schism, promoted the independence of the ecclesiastical cities, many of which then passed under the dominion of domestic tyrants, or assumed the privileges of self-government. In either case the result was favourable to an expansion of the human mind. The sway of the seigneurs, being based on no such aristocratic machinery as supported the fabric of feudalism, threw fewer obstructions in the way of individual merit. The popular communities could only exist by a diffusion of political and legislative capacity, and the commercial enterprises to which they in general devoted their energies increased at once the demand for public spirit and its production. Even those intestine revolutions to which democracies were especially subject contributed largely to the same end; for, although in such convulsions the dregs of the populace often rise to the surface, talent, when backed by energy and daring, there finds extraordinary opportunities for display. Indeed, the multiplication of commonwealths, under whatever form of government, tended, in a country situated as the Italian Peninsula then was, to the development of intellect. Defended by the Alps and the sea from invasion, their-97- physical and intellectual advantages constituted an influence which supplied the want of union and nationality. They thus could safely pursue their individual aims, and even indulge in rivalry and contests which, though perilous to a less favoured people, were for them incentives to a praiseworthy and patriotic exertion. Whilst the separate existence of these petty states was calculated to promote both political science and mental culture, it rendered the one subservient to the advantage of the other, and, in the multitude of official and diplomatic employments, literary men found at once useful occupation and honourable independence. Nor was this result limited to one form of government. If the tempest-tossed democracy of Florence shone the brightest star in the Italian galaxy, the stern oligarchy of Venice shed an almost equal lustre in some branches of letters and art; and, on the other hand, the not less popular institutions of Pisa, Siena, and Lucca emitted but feeble and irregular coruscations. So also in the despotic states, whilst literature was ever cherished under the ducal dynasty of Urbino, and whilst it was favoured at intervals by the Sforza and Malatesta, the d'Este and Gonzaga, and by the Aragonese sovereigns of Naples, its genial influence was unknown in some other petty courts. Again, if we turn to the papal throne, we shall find the accomplished Nicolas, Pius, Sixtus, Julius, and Leo, sitting alternately with the Bœotian Calixtus, Paul, Innocent, and Alexander. From an impartial review of Italian mediæval history it appears that democratic institutions were by no means indispensable to the expansion of genius, since the progress of letters and arts was upon the whole nearly equal in the republics and the seigneuries, under the tyranny of a condottiere or the domination of a faction.[*65]

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But, before entering upon the proper subject of this chapter, it may be well briefly to consider the influence which the petty princes of Italy exercised upon the revival and cultivation of letters and arts. The dominion of these chiefs, though hereditary in name, was in general maintained, as it had been gained, by the sword. To them, as to the savage, arms were an instinctive pursuit, warfare a primary occupation. For their frequent intervals of truce (and in no other sense was peace known to them), their circumscribed sovereignty gave little occupation. Domestic polity was still an undeveloped science, and their leisure fell to be spent upon intellectual objects, or in grovelling debaucheries. The number who preferred the nobler alternative is very remarkable, when compared with the like class in other parts of Europe. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries literature was cultivated and art was encouraged by a large proportion of the sovereigns and feudatories of Italy, when the bravest condottieri were often their most liberal patrons. Such were the impetuous Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, the gallant Francesco Sforza, the treacherous Ludovico il Moro; whilst the Gonzaga of Mantua, and the d'Este of Ferrara, but most especially the ducal houses of Urbino, extended, during successive generations, an enlightened and almost regal protection to genius of every shade. Nothing akin to this is to be found in the republics. Siena, Pisa, and Lucca produced many great artists, but literature found in them neither a cradle nor an asylum. The commercial communities of Venice and Genoa belonged to an entirely different category of circumstances; and Florence, though an exception to our remark, owed its pre-eminence not less perhaps to the patronage of the Medici than to an unparalleled prevalence of talent and public spirit among its citizens.

In times when the popular will, if not the source of power, was its best support, it became the interest of the-99- dominant prince or party so to use authority as to please and flatter the masses; to cloak their own usurpations by throwing a lustre around their administration, and to preserve the confidence of their subjects by institutions calculated to promote the national glory. In this way individual talent might be stimulated, and public civilisation might advance, even whilst freedom was on the decline; and, as the means commanded by the seigneurs were ample, they could patronise genius, and surround their courts with literary retainers, who in democratic communities were left to their own resources. Thus the Sforza and the d'Este, even the savage Malatesta of Rimini, befriended genius, which found no haven in the republics of Genoa and Lucca, and, the fashion having once been established among their princely houses, letters were cultivated by not a few of these soldiers of fortune, but more especially by the ladies of their families.

These unquestionable facts are met by an allegation that the fountains of princely patronage were so tainted, their streams so generally corrupt, as to blight the fruits which they seemed to foster, and that their influence thus from a blessing became a curse. Let us examine a little the grounds for this assertion, for surely it is not by such sweeping and prejudiced denunciations that we shall arrive at truth. As to the ornamental arts, there cannot be a doubt that these received, throughout Italy, from governments of every form, as well as from numberless corporations and individuals, a hearty encouragement which might well shame our degenerate age. Yet the ducal palace at Urbino, the Palazzo del T at Mantua, the tombs of the Scaligers, and the medallions of Malatesta, yield the palm to no republican works of the same class. It was by Cosimo and Lorenzo de' Medici, and by Duke Federigo di Montefeltro, that the undeveloped energies of new-born science, and the long neglected classics of Greece and Rome were nursed and tended through their-100- years of infancy, which storms of faction, in most of the free states, condemned to neglect. The enlightened liberality of these princes, and of Malatesta Novello, founded libraries for the preservation of works composed under their own beneficent encouragement, as well as of manuscripts collected by them from all quarters at immense cost, and this when no republic but Venice aspired to such literary distinctions. Nor were the troubled waters of democratic strife safe for the poet's gay bark and light canvas. Even Dante, though made of sternest stuff, sought shelter in a courtly harbour from the hurricanes of Florentine faction. It is true that, in many compositions of minstrels trained in princely halls, the themes are ephemeral and the epithets overstrained, savouring, to a purer taste and more severe idiom, of unworthy subserviency; nor is the other polite literature, emanating from the same atmosphere, exempt from similar blemishes. But allowance must be made for the seducing fecundity of the language in superlatives, more redolent of dulcet sounds than of definite signification, a quality which has ever tempted Italian mediocrity to assume the borrowed plumes of poesy, and to conceal its native barrenness under magniloquent but flimsy common-places. The well earned gratitude of authors is fittingly paid in compliments, eulogies, or dedications, and as such coin is at the unlimited command of the debtor, and useful only to the receiver, its over-issue is fairly excusable. This results from principles inherent in human nature, and it matters little whether the obligations have been incurred from sovereigns or from subjects, under an autocrat or a democracy. Even among ourselves, in times when talent had more to hope from private patronage than from extended popularity, a similar currency was scarcely less in vogue, and it was only the poverty of our idiom that kept its circulation within bounds. Hence, were the independence of the best English writers of a century or two ago-101- to be estimated from their dedicatory addresses, or their occasional odes, a condemnation as unreasonable as sweeping would go forth against names long inscribed in our temple of fame. This argument might easily be extended; but enough has been said to show that more was done for the support of letters under princely than under popular institutions, and that the adulatory epithets natural to the language, and inherent in the usages of Italy, are no certain index of base subserviency.

But, on the other hand, independent sovereignty, irrespective of political forms, was of primary importance to the encouragement of mental cultivation. The separation of Italy into a multitude of petty states converted almost every town into a capital, which its rulers and its citizens took equal pride in decorating. The patriotism thus generated was intense in proportion to the narrow field on which it was exercised, and an expenditure, restrained by severe sumptuary restrictions, found scope on monuments honourable to the public. Thus there ensued, between hostile communities and emulous factions, a rivalry in arts as in arms, whereby public institutions prospered, and individual genius was encouraged. Fanes, whose glories seem to defy the waste of time, were thus raised for the devotional requirements of the people; palaces grew up the bulwark of their liberties; citadels were fortified to rivet their chains; and even when the ultimate results were fatal to freedom, the talent and activity thus stimulated were sure to eventuate in industrial progress, as well as in the restoration of letters and the improvement of art.

The human mind, when aroused from its long and leaden slumbers, at first instinctively leaned for support upon such vestiges of ancient learning as had survived the wreck of ages. To excavate and examine these was the laborious task assumed by early students, in which-102- Petrarch and Boccaccio sedulously joined. But, justly appreciating them as materials on which to found a new fabric, rather than as the substitutes for original thought, "the all-Etruscan three" happily combined enthusiasm for classic models with the power to rival them in a language simultaneously matured by themselves for the daring undertaking. The fifteenth century arrived; it was an epoch of reaction; one of other tendencies and tastes, when genius, as Ginguené has happily observed, was superseded by erudition. Entering the path which Petrarch had partially explored, its pioneers neglected the better portion of his example. They spent their energies in rummaging obscure recesses of monastic libraries, and wasted time and learning in transcribing, collating, and annotating the various manuscripts which thus fell within their grasp. In exhuming and renovating these monuments of a long-buried literature, they were forgetful of the fact that their dealings were with dead corpses; and whilst submitting the recovered fragments to philological analysis, they perversely sought to embody their own souls in these decayed members. As such materials were incapable of being reanimated, or even remodelled into more apt forms, this unnatural union was seldom effected without violence to the sentiment. Even the ablest writers devoted themselves to the arid task of scholia and translations, composing in the dead tongues such original works as they attempted. The result was a monstrous metempsychosis, whereby thought, enchained in uncongenial bodies, lost its due influence, and appeared in, at best, an unseemly masquerade. Hence the language of the century was Latin, its manner pedantic, its spirit coldly artificial.

But whilst the historian of that age laments the shackles thus imposed upon its literature, it were unjust to withhold from it the merit of preserving those treasures of ancient history and philosophy, eloquence and poetry,-103- which, under happier auspices and more judicious treatment, have elevated thought, enlarged intellect, and enriched the style of later times. Although unable to refine the true metal from its dross, the pedants of "fourteen hundred" were miners who discovered the precious ore, and ascertained its component ingredients. The fashionable ardour for collecting early MSS. of ancient authors was very generally accompanied with untiring perseverance in mastering their intricacies. Philology and grammar thus grew into sciences, and their professors held the keys of human erudition. Deep ought to be our gratitude for the contingent of classical literature rescued from a rapid destruction by such arduous and self-denying labours; and a history of these discoveries, and of the zeal and enterprise volunteered by the early commentators and publishers of the ancient authors, would form an interesting monument of undaunted and generally successful diligence. Yet, in a comprehensive view of the results springing from these new tendencies, it is impossible to blind ourselves to the evils that emanated from them. From the nerve, grandeur, and elegance of Greek and Roman writers, there was much to learn with advantage; but their influence was directly antagonist to the highest sentiments of a Christian, and, in the main, a devotional people. When tried by such a test, their philosophy was hollow, their heroism selfish, their refinement corrupted. Nor was it only by reproducing the themes and the philosophy of distant ages that classicism clogged the elasticity of reviving literature. By inculcating extinct languages as the only means fitted for expressing their ideas, Italian literati checked the progress of their vernacular tongue,—that best bulwark of nationality,—and at the same time impeded the free expansion of thought, which, thus conducted into artificial channels, could but stagnate or freeze. The mind, habituated to find in literature a restraint, came to regard natural feeling as a solecism, living images as incongruous-104- anomalies, warmth of sentiment as a blemish sedulously to be avoided. Under such false training, knowledge received the impress of a languid conventionality; and even those who condescended to write in Italian, chilled their compositions with the pedantry of antique idioms. The classic style thus introduced had many inherent defects. Borrowed plumage is seldom becoming, and servile imitations are always bad. Besides, the ancient type had been originally modelled by a people, and in an age, little sympathetic with those for whom it was now reproduced, and whose sentiments were cramped equally by the conventionalisms of an obsolete manner, or by the adoption of a dead tongue. Hence is it that the fifteenth century, so signalised by the diffusion of knowledge, and the advance of the fine arts, has bequeathed to us fewer eminent writers than those which immediately preceded and followed it, and that during its course Italian literature was unquestionably retrograde.

This is especially true of poetry, in an age of erudition when learning was essentially prosaic. The collation of manuscripts, the construction of grammars, the mastering of idioms, the revived subtleties of Greek dialectics, were ponderous studies with which the taste for literature of a lighter and more elastic tendency could ill assimilate. The chords whence Dante had evoked majestic notes, that seemed to swell from higher spheres, lay silent and unstrung; the lyre of Petrarch was left in feebler hands.

Nor was this the only evil resulting from an excess of the classical mania. Languages in which Christianity had not been naturalised were ill adapted for the expression of revealed truth; and the new scholarship, discarding the barbarisms of monastic Latin, imported into theological as well as profane compositions, the phrases of a pagan age. To find the personages of the Trinity, or even the hagiology of Rome, familiarly discussed under mytho-105-logical names, is to us merely absurd and revolting;[*66] but when men, already imbued with classical predilections, were accustomed to mix up in words the objects of their worship with the demigods of their admiration, the natural consequence was a confusion of ideas nowise favourable to the maintenance of their faith or the purity of their morals.

A not less prejudicial element emanated from the revived philosophies of Greece, which now arrested attention and divided the speculations of learned men. That derived from Aristotle, and known to Europe through the sages of Arabia, had long occupied the cloisters, where alone mind was then exercised, or its operations studied. The rival system of Plato came directly from its native soil; and was first publicly taught in Italy early in the fifteenth century, by Gemistus Plato,[*67] of Constantinople. It attracted the notice of Cosimo Pater Patriæ, who after having Marsilio Ficino, son of his physician, grounded in its mysteries by Greeks of learning, placed him at the head of an academy in Florence, instituted by himself for the dissemination of its doctrines. From thence these radiated, absorbing the attention of literary men, and enlisting many converts from the Stagirite faith. Aristotle and Plato became the watchwords of contending sects,[*68] and the usual jarring results of such logomachy were not long-106- wanting. The merits of a question, at first exaggerated by its respective zealots, were lost sight of in the torrent of abuse which gradually superseded argument, and inflamed every evil passion. Far overleaping the legitimate limits or literary warfare, disputant logicians advanced from replies to libels, from words to blows, and, after exhausting the armoury of invective, had recourse to the dagger. But on a subject so painful we are not called to enter. Backed by the authority of Nicholas V., the zeal of Cardinal Bessarion, and the example of the Medici, the sublime and imaginative speculations of Platonism for a time prevailed over the more material system of the Stagirite, and Florence became their head-quarters. The human mind, unaided by revelation, has never invented any system so abstractly beautiful, so pure in its morals, so elevating in its conceptions, so harmonious in its conclusions. Its lofty ethics rank next to the doctrines of inspiration, for it taught that happiness is the natural result of virtue, and that the mischiefs entailed by the passions are ill repaid by their transient pleasures. Yet, though thus intrinsically calculated to ennoble and refine the heart of fallen man, the Platonic theories indirectly led to lamentable results, both to the religion and the morality of the age. The divine revelation was by them virtually superseded, and paganism, from an affectation, became a conviction, or, at the least, a prevailing fashion, warping the manners and phrases, the faith and spirit of the age. Men lived for the present world by the light of human reason, until they forgot or denied a future existence, and a holier wisdom. The first blow struck at this practical heathenism came from Paul II., a Venetian, who was behind the age in its knowledge, as well as in its extravagances, and who relentlessly persecuted what he had not the capacity to redargue. Mind was, however, no longer to be silenced by papal bulls, or trammelled by penal fetters: it regarded the use of such-107- weapons as proof that the spiritual armoury contained none more serviceable, and learned to demur to an ecclesiastical despotism it already loathed. Succeeding pontiffs disavowed the policy of Paul: but the old respect for the papacy was shaken; doubts arrayed themselves against dogmas, cavilling superseded blind faith, until the dissolute example set by the courts of Innocent, Alexander, and Leo, converted scepticism into infidelity, apathy into open aggression. It is impossible to contemplate the great talents, the unwearied application, absorbed by these rival systems of philosophy, without a sigh that they should have been wasted on inquiries so purely speculative; yet, it cannot be denied that the controversy prepared weapons that have since done good service in many a better cause; that it developed mental energies, and matured intellectual discipline, from which the world continues largely to benefit.

Although the revival of letters had been advancing during several generations ere the chiefs of Montefeltro sought other laurels than those of the battle-field, it was reserved for these princes to contribute no mean aids towards their full development in that golden harvest which the fifteenth century saw gathered in. Indeed, the concurrent testimony of all writers has claimed for the sovereigns of Urbino a foremost place among the friends of literature. In the words of the general motto of this work, which well condense the prevailing opinion, "it is notorious beyond question even of the malignant, that the house of Montefeltro and della Rovere has for a long time past been that which [most] shed a lustre upon Italy by letters, arms, and every sort of rare worth, and that the court of Urbino may be termed a Pegasean spring, in the language of historic truth rather than of poetic hyperbole." It was to the successive reigns of Dukes Federigo and Guidobaldo I. that such expressions were generally ap-108-plied, and to them our attention will now be directed; but in a future portion of this work we shall endeavour to maintain for their della Rovere successors a similar reputation.

Were we to estimate the celebrities of Urbino by the encomiums of their partial countrymen, and measure their claims upon mundane immortality by the standard set up by Baldi Lazzari, Grossi, Cimarelli, and Olivieri, it would become our indispensable duty to add at least a volume to the present work. But these authors were deeply imbued with that peculiarly Italian patriotism which, narrowing its sympathies within the limits of a township or a petty state, enshrined provincial mediocrity in a temple of fame modelled upon a scale of national splendour. Believing that the dignity of their little fatherland depended upon the notices of its existence which they could worm out of antique memorials, however doubtful in authority, and upon the number of notable names they could connect with its localities, they tasked themselves to this investigation with industry worthy of a nobler and more useful object. Many folio volumes, ponderous in their contents as in their material, were the result; but they preserve only laborious trifling, a harvest of wordy conclusions gleaned from a soil barren of tangible facts, dissertations which may be summed up in the axiom ex nihilo nihil fit, "nothing comes of nought." Like those of the northern senachies, their themes were often legendary or invented, and it would have been scarcely a loss to literature had these productions been equally fugitive. Should the worthies mentioned in the following chapters seem scarcely to maintain the literary renown of Urbino, our readers ought in justice to remember that scarcely a tithe has found place in our pages of those whom zealous eulogists have placed upon the roll of Italian literati, but

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THE reputation long enjoyed by the house of Montefeltro as patrons of letters and arts can scarcely be traced further back than Federigo, second Duke of Urbino. Yet the few memorials that remain of his father, Count Guidantonio, throw some scattered lights upon congenial tastes, and from these we select three letters to the magistracy of Siena, which are preserved in the Archivio Diplomatico of that city. The first of them is written in Latin, the others in Italian.

Among the traits of literary taste displayed by Duke Federigo, we learn from his biographer Muzio, that it was his custom to repair weekly to the Franciscan convent, and to encourage among its learned society debates and discussions on subjects analogous to their studies. Upon this somewhat loose foundation, he has been claimed as founder-112- of the Assorditi, and it has been ranked among the earliest academies in Italy. We need not pause to investigate their respective titles to honours so questionable, now that such associations are generally recognised as prolific of two enormous literary nuisances, pedantry and puerility. From their antipathic contact genius long has fled, leaving the field open to triumphant mediocrity. Pretending to no original efforts, it was their narrow aim to imitate standard productions, or to ring the changes upon them in prosing and pointless commentaries. To indite two tomes of scholia on a sonnet of Petrarch was the dreary task that qualified for admission into the Florentine Academy; to string Platonic nothings into rhyme was the high ambition which numbered votaries by hundreds. The Assorditi were no exception from the usual category of mediocrity; and whether they were first associated under Federigo's protection, or, as Tiraboschi alleges, sprang into existence under Guidobaldo II., is of little moment to the literary history of Urbino.

Gentile de' Becci was probably a native of Urbino, but the interest attaching to his name is owing rather to the distinction attained by his pupils than to his own. He was selected by Pietro de' Medici to train up his son Lorenzo the Magnificent; and to have educated such a mind is an unexceptionable title to fame. Yet the Christian philanthropist who sighs over the dross which mingled with its ore, the impure uses to which its bright metal was in some respects misdirected, by a master who might have moulded it to holier purposes, and might have enriched by its talents the treasury of truth and the triumphs of religion, may well hesitate ere he grants to the preceptor of Lorenzo a reflected share of his glory, without also holding him responsible for that pagan epicureanism which spread like a pestilence from the Medicean court throughout Italy. Nor do the notices remaining of Becci tend to nullify such an inference. The favour of his patrons naturally obtaining for him rapid promotion, he was raised to the see of Arezzo in 1473. But his life was that of a statesman rather than that of a good pastor. We read of his tact as a diplomatist, his skill in public affairs, his dexterous civil administration of his diocese,-114- by directing towards commercial industry energies which had wasted themselves on faction; we are assured that his popularity was confirmed by his encouragement of liberal arts, by his mild and courteous character; we are told that in political science his pen was ably employed. But regarding his theological attainments, the purity of his morals, the zeal of his clerical ministrations, his eulogists are silent. We may add that to him Guicciardini in some degree imputes the miscarriage of the proposed league of Italy against the French invasion in 1492, in consequence of his personal ambition, when sent to conduct the negotiations at Rome on the part of the Medici, whilst his thoughtless extravagance there wasted resources of the Florentines which might have been better spent on military preparations.

Of Ludovico Odasio it is unnecessary to add anything to what we have already had occasion to say.[69] Francesco Venturini of Urbino is reputed the first after the revival who wrote a complete Latin grammar. It was dedicated to Count Ottaviano Ubaldini, and was printed at Florence in 1482, and again in his native town by Henry of Cologne, in 1493-4.[70] Among his pupils he is said to have numbered both Raffaele and Michael Angelo.[*71]-115- Besides Berni da Gubbio, whose Diary has been edited in the Scriptores of Muratori, there were several annotators of events in their native duchy, whose prose writings remain in the Vatican Library, and have supplied us with useful information; but they were not historians, and it is unnecessary to bring them forth from their obscurity. Of one name, however, we may make an exception.

Polydoro di Vergilio was born at Urbino about 1470, and studied at Bologna. His relation, Adrian Castellesi, who, when Cardinal of Corneto, was well known both in England and at Rome,[72] had been sent by Innocent VIII. as legate to Scotland, but remained at London in consequence of the death of James III. at the battle of Stirling. There he was joined by Polydoro, who, on taking priest's orders, had, through his influence, obtained from Alexander VI. the collectorship of an old house-tax in England called Romescot, or Peter's pence, originally imposed in Saxon times for the maintenance of English pilgrims to Rome. Aliens being there frequently objects of church preferment, he, in 1503, obtained the rectory of Church Langton in Leicestershire; and, on his patron's appointment in the following year to the see of Bath and Wells, the path of further promotion was opened to him. In 1507 he became prebendary of Lincoln and of Hereford, and archdeacon of Wells, on which he resigned his collectorship. In 1515 he shared an imprisonment in the-116- Tower, brought upon Adrian by the jealousy of Wolsey, whose haughty spirit, disappointed of the purple, attributed the delayed honours to the Bishop's influence. Letters were consequently written by Sadoleto in Leo's name to the English court on behalf of Polydoro, and Wolsey having received the much coveted scarlet hat, there was no further pretext for his detention. The date of his return home is variously stated at 1534 or 1550, and he carried from Henry VIII. a recommendation which procured him letters of nobility from his own sovereign. His literary talents being probably somewhat overrated in Italy, the long residence he made in the hotbed of heresy, without exercising his pen in defence of his Church, appears to have brought the purity of his faith under suspicion. That there was no tangible ground for the imputation may be presumed from his spending the rest of his life unquestioned at Urbino, where he died in 1555, and was buried in the Duomo.

The favour which Vergilio obtained in Adrian's eyes was partly owing to his success in cultivating the niceties of the Latin tongue, to restore which in its purity was a favourite project of the Cardinal. Before quitting Italy he had dedicated to Guidobaldo I. his Proverbiorum Libellus, a volume scarcely meriting the controversy upon which he entered with Erasmus as to the priority of suggesting such a collection. In 1499 he finished his treatise De Inventoribus Rerum, which was placed in the index of prohibited works, in consequence of tracing certain liturgical observances back to pagan superstitions; Grossi, however, vindicates his orthodoxy by ascribing the obnoxious passages to heretical interpolation. His essay De Prodigiis is an attempt to explain upon natural principles all omens, auguries, and other superstitious observances. As it is inscribed to Duke Francesco Maria I., he probably returned to Italy before 1538.

But what chiefly interests us is a Latin History of-117- England, which he is said to have undertaken at the suggestion of Henry VII., or more probably of Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester, who procured him access to certain archives. This work, from being the first general compilation of the sort given to the public, obtained more consideration than its superficial and inaccurate matter deserved; and Mr. Roscoe well observes that it has not gained the suffrages of posterity, either by ability or freedom from bias. Among the impugners of its veracity are Whear, Humphrey Lloyd, Henry Savile, and Bishop Bale. Some of these excuse his blunders on the questionable plea of his ignorance of English government, dialects, and manners, while Leland regrets that a writer so little trustworthy should have cast over his deceptions the graces of style. Anticipating perhaps such an aspersion, he, in his dedication of the work to Henry VIII., dated from London in 1530, compared the chronicles of Bede and Gildas, crude in form and phraseology, to meat served without the salt which it was his object to supply. Yet while the English blame him for misrepresentations,—avenged in the stinging Latin epigram,

Giovio cites the testimony of French and Scotch authors to his partiality for the land of his adoption. More serious, but unestablished, is a charge greatly resented by his countrymen, that, after garbling records and ancient muniments thrown open to his examination, he consummated the outrage by destroying the evidence of his villainy. It may, however, be well to keep in view that, although Bale claims him as a willing reformer of certain Romish abuses, his adherence to that Church brought on him distrust of the Protestants, in an age when theological disputes were matter affecting life and limb.

In the Vatican is preserved a MS. of this history in two-118- volumes folio, of 1210 pages, in twenty-five books, ending with the death of James IV. of Scotland in 1512. The narrative is preceded by a dedication in Latin to Francesco Maria II., from Antonio Vergilio Battiferri, grand-nephew of the author, which is dated in 1613, and mentions the MS. as autograph. Yet on the last leaf is this colophon, apparently in the same hand: "Rogo ut bene conserventur, simul cum aliis in cenobio venerand. monalium Sce. Clare de Urbino, quousque bella, Deo favente, cessabunt. Ego Federicus Ludovici Veterani Urbinus scripsi totum opus." But though not the original, that transcriber's name guarantees the accuracy of this copy. An extract from it in II. of the Appendix proves that the Leyden edition of 1651 is in fact a loose paraphrase of the work.[73]

Two members only of the brilliant and lettered court of Guidobaldo have gained enduring celebrity from their writings—Castiglione and Bembo.[*76] The former may be considered a pattern of gentlemanly writing, the latter of scholarlike composition. We have already said what is necessary of both, and have introduced into our narrative an idea of Count Baldassare's Cortegiano, its objects and style. It is said to have been suggested by Louis XII., and written about 1516, but the author's preface seems to point at an earlier date. Two of his published letters to Bembo show how anxiously he awaited the suffrage of his friends, among whom it was handed about; but it was sent to press in 1528, only in consequence of the alarm of a pirated edition being in preparation, from a MS. which had been submitted to the-120- famed Vittoria Colonna, Marchioness of Pescara. The number of reprints which issued during the next fifty years was at least forty-two. A variety of circumstances conduced to this extensive and continued popularity. Books professing to initiate the many into habits and mysteries of refined society ever have claims on public curiosity, but the attraction was here increased by the dazzling reputation of the palace-circle at Urbino, as well as by the charms of erudition, wit, elegance, and worldly wisdom which sparkle in every page. It has, however, been remarked that most translations of the Cortegiano have failed to obtain the applause bestowed upon the original. The observation may be taken as a compliment to the polish of its diction, and to those delicacies of expression that bear no transplanting into another idiom. It also proves that the celebrity of this work rests much upon its style. The subject could scarcely be treated at such length without falling into that diffuseness and repetition, which, though clothed in beauty by the rich fluency of the Italian language, must always degenerate into monotony when rendered by the bold expletives of a less copious tongue.

In a period when princes and courts little resembled what they have since become, we possess from the pens of Machiavelli and Castiglione generalised portraits of both; and they may be relied on as genuine, although the Tuscan, like the tenebristi painters, overloaded his darker shadows, whilst the Mantuan Count employed the roseate tinting of licensed flattery. Roscoe considers the Cortegiano an ethical treatise, yet it belongs as much to belles-lettres as to moral philosophy. Its author has been called the Chesterfield of Italy, and the parallel is singularly apt. The Count and the Earl have each supplied "a glass of fashion and a mould of form" for the guidance of their courtly contemporaries, and the posthumous reputation of both with the world at large rests more upon their dicta-121- as arbiters of politeness, than upon their rare diplomatic address and statesmanlike attainments. With all its interest as a picture of manners and a test of civilisation in that proverbially refined age, with every charm which elegance of style can impart, it is impossible to dwell on the Cortegiano without feeling that its influence was then fraught with evil. In the pages of that essay were first systematically embodied precepts of tact, lessons of adulation, all repugnant to the stern manners and wholesome independence of antecedent generations. The homely bearing of honest burghers, the rough and ready speech of men who lived in harness, were there put out of fashion by studied phrase and cringing flattery, too easy preparations for the effeminate euphuism and fulsome servility which Spanish thraldom soon after imposed upon Italy.

Another work of Castiglione, to which we have already had occasion to refer, is his letter, written in Latin, to Henry VIII., containing an account of Guidobaldo's death, with a somewhat meagre sketch of his character. But there is in its composition an air of effort, a straining at rhetorical effect, which leave upon us the inevitable conclusion that he thought more of his style than his hero. These faults and deficiencies belong, however, in a still greater degree to that more ambitious disquisition, wherein Bembo has sought to honour the memory of the Duke and Duchess, whose favour he had amply enjoyed. His few fugitive poems well merit the preference accorded to them by Tiraboschi over most contemporary effusions, from force of sentiment not less than felicitous expression. It would be difficult to rival in the literature of any age the pathos of that ode wherein his beloved wife is supposed to sigh over his prolonged absence, and send him the sympathetic yearnings of her long-suppressed affection. Of this, however, and his Tirsis, we have already said enough.[77]

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The courtly qualities of Count Baldassare are acknowledged wherever his native literature is known; that they were not inconsistent with his observance of parental feelings is proved by an interesting Latin letter addressed to his children the year before his death, which has been preserved by Negrini in his Elogii Historici of the Castiglione family.

The position which Bembo holds in the literature of Italy's golden age is not less singular than prominent. As an historian and poet, a philologist and rhetorician, and as a voluminous writer of official and private letters, he challenges criticism and has gained applause. It is, however, as a reformer of style that his claims have been most freely accorded, and his example held up to general imitation. Following the fashion of his day, he regarded classical, and especially Latin, attainments, as the attribute most needful for an accomplished man. But he went further; and, aware of the coarse and rugged manner into which literature had fallen, sought to correct Latin composition, and to perfect his own tongue, after the purest ancient standards. On this object he spared no pains, till by long and laborious practice he wrote in both with equal precision. He is said to have subjected each of his works to forty separate critical revisions, and no one can read a page without feeling that, as with too many of his countrymen, the manner has occupied quite as much thought as the matter. This naturally tended to an opposite extreme, for the studied structure of his sentences, and the fatiguing recurrence of mythological allusion, are blemishes greatly detracting from the pleasure afforded by his works.[79] Scaliger, accordingly, has scourged his-124- pagan misnomers of divine things, while his "childish heresy" of abject Ciceronian imitation is ridiculed by Lansius and Lipsius. Yet there is justice in the test applied to them by Tiraboschi; for great and wide-spread evils require extreme remedies, and the prevailing laxity of style having been once brought into discredit by his example, those who followed were able to avail themselves of his guidance and taste, without falling into the rigidity and constraint which blemish his compositions. Indeed, notwithstanding these obvious blots, which hero-worship has mistaken for beauties, his History of Venice, his Essay on Imitation, his diplomatic and familiar correspondence, and even his poetry, must, when tried by then-received standards, be allowed a merit entitling them to the general suffrage of contemporaries. It is to his Latin prose that our strictures are most applicable. Forgetting, in his zealous imitation of Cicero, the allowance due to modern themes, principles, and feelings, he so slavishly followed that heathen philosopher's idioms, as to clothe what he meant for Christianity in the words of paganism. Even his letters, running in name of the successor of St. Peter, transmuted the Almighty into a pantheistic generality, our Saviour into a hero, and the Madonna into a goddess of Loreto. It may be feared that this latitudinarianism was not limited to manner, for an anecdote alleges him to have seriously recommended a young divine to avoid reading St. Paul's Epistles, lest they might mar his style.

Compositions conceived and executed in so eclectic a spirit could scarcely avoid falling into coldness and pedantry; and such are prominent faults in his Venetian history, and his tribute to Duke Guidobaldo,—two works especially connected with the subject of these pages. The former is the most important production of his pen, and was begun in 1529, by desire of the Signory, in continuation of Sabellico's narrative, It is comprised in-125- twelve books, extending from 1487 to 1513, where it remained unfinished at his death, but was continued by Paruta. From a contemporary possessing talent, industry, leisure, and high literary reputation, as well as many opportunities of personal observation, very large expectations might be legitimately entertained. But as a churchman, he is said to have been jealously excluded from the Venetian archives, a condition which, in the judgment of Tiraboschi, ought to have disqualified him from the task, and which may account for, if it cannot excuse, the superficial character of the narrative, the poverty of graphic details, and the teasing absence of dates. On the composition, too, his classic mania has left its withering traces. It was his ambition here to rival the Commentaries of Cæsar; and, in perfecting the idiom of a dead language, he has constrained freedom of thought, and polished away the life and spirit of his theme. We have examined his pages, as an indispensable authority upon events which occupy several chapters of our work; but those who read Italian history for pleasure will generally prefer to do so either in the Italian tongue or their own. Conscious probably of this, the author himself translated the work into his vernacular language, and both versions were published soon after his death.

His dissertation on the characters of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino is written in Latin, and exhibits all those blemishes of style to which we have just referred, and which so strangely jar upon the fulsome flattery and elaborate verbiage which he labours to reduce into Ciceronian terseness. Though entitled a "Book," the whole occupies but a hundred pages in the octavo edition of his works (1567), whereof scarcely one third is original matter. It is addressed to Nicolò Tiepolo, a literary gentleman of Venice, and professes to have been committed to writing for the satisfaction of some Venetians-126- who, feeling an interest in Guidobaldo as their former guest, had applied to the father of Bembo for some account of his death. It is thrown into a dialogue between himself, Sadoleto, Filippo Beroaldo the younger, and Sigismondo [Conti?] of Foligno. The last-named personage supplies to their inquiries a narrative of the Duke's closing hours, addressed to Julius II., by Federigo Fregoso, along with the funeral oration pronounced at his obsequies by his preceptor Odasio. The former of these is written in a strain beseeming a heathen philosopher, rather than a Christian dignitary; the latter, which Tiraboschi has detected as very different from the printed oration, is to the full as turgid and tiresome as are most such efforts of Italian adulation; neither of them tell anything of importance that Castiglione has not better given us.

The whole discourse is, as I have had occasion to mention,[80] of but trifling value to the biographer of these personages. Facts are generalised until no substance remains; incidents and traits of character are lost in the multiplicity of epithets; and thus we have, instead of a speaking likeness, a vague and showy picture, overladen with ornaments until individuality is gone. The warmer emotions of the heart could scarcely, perhaps, be happily clothed in the abstractions of a dead tongue, unadapted to the times, and to circumstances which required the outpourings of unaffected grief; at all events, these measured periods and studied phrases give no real pleasure. Bembo was an elegant Latinist, but in such a work the language of nature could alone afford satisfaction. When we seek to know the true characters of his distinguished patrons, we are dismissed with an inflated rhetorical exercise; we are offered bread, and find it a stone. These strictures apply to the long funeral oration, but still more to the dull didactic discourse of the four friends,-127- which wants the fire and feeling of the eulogy, and is soiled by gross details gratuitously introduced on a point at which good taste would have barely glanced. In all respects, the most interesting portion of the work is Fregoso's letter, upon which we have drawn in describing the death-bed of Guidobaldo. On the whole, this production may be dismissed with a doubt whether its prosiness or its pruriency is most offensive. Nor will the perusal of those papal brieves, extended by the same writer, which despoiled of his inheritance the Duke's adopted child, blasphemously ejecting him from the pale of Christendom, give a higher opinion of the sincerity of this ungrateful sycophant.

His other works, having no immediate reference to our subject, may be dismissed with few words. The Prose, a treatise upon rhetoric, intended to fix the standard of pure Italian composition, is a dialogue, to which Giuliano de' Medici and Federigo Fregoso are parties. Gli Asolani, a more juvenile production, was named from the castle of Asolo, at which some youths are represented as discussing the tender passion in all its moods and modifications. This theme, notwithstanding the tedious manner in which it is treated, gave it great popularity over western Europe in the sixteenth century, but the style and substance alike render it unpalatable to modern amateurs of light reading. His Latin treatise De Imitatione is a dull defence of his Ciceronian mannerisms; his essay in the same language upon Virgil and Terence a laboured philological critique; his De Ætna Liber a report of physical observations during an early residence near that volcano. His poetry, both Latin and Italian, enjoyed high reputation at a period when imitations of Petrarch had degenerated into common-place; for he succeeded in brushing away the rust of ages, and restoring much of the bright polish peculiar to the bard of Arqua. Lastly, his very numerous private and official letters have preserved to us a valuable-128- store of facts, and much curious illustration of coeval manners and individual character.

The share of laborious learning voluntarily borne by ladies of the highest birth in the fifteenth century is a singular problem. There was scarcely a sovereign family that could not boast among its daughters some votary of intellectual pursuits, in an age when mental cultivation was of a sort more calculated to overburden genius, than to give wings to fancy in her flight after knowledge. A familiar acquaintance with Latin was then requisite, being the key to modern as well as classic and biblical literature, and also the current language of diplomacy or courtly intercourse.[*81] The abstruse distinctions of ancient philosophy, the complex tenets of dogmatic theology, the fatiguing jargon of scholastic disputation, were all included in the circle of female accomplishments. Such were the graces for which Bianca d'Este, Isotta Nogarolo, and Veronica Gambara were famed; while another Isotta, paramour of the truculent Lord of Rimini, divided contemporary adulation between the beauties of her person and her mind. The vagueness of such eulogies might well justify scepticism as to the profundity of that lore they were intended to vaunt; but in the case of Ippolita Maria Sforza, daughter of Francesco Duke of Milan, and wife of Alfonso King of Naples, chance has afforded us a standard of the knowledge mastered by these learned ladies. It was for this princess that Constantine Lascaris composed the earliest Greek Grammar; and in the convent library of Sta. Croce at Rome there is a transcript by her of Cicero De Senectute, followed by a juvenile collection of Latin apophthegms curiously indicative of her character and studies. The house of Montefeltro could boast a full-129- share of such distinction, in Princess Battista, wife of the wretched Galeazzo Lord of Pesaro, to whose literary celebrity we have elsewhere paid our tribute, and whose progeny we have seen maintaining the prestige of her accomplishments to the third generation. Her great-granddaughter Battista Sforza rivalled her accomplishments, and those of her cousin Ippolita Maria, and, when placed by her marriage at the head of the court at Urbino, contributed much to the literary reputation which it then first obtained. Its two succeeding duchesses of the Gonzaga race, although women of remarkable talent, did not carry so far the cultivation of their natural powers; but we have found, in their relative and associate Emilia Pia, one whose learning was scarcely less notable than her wit.

Such were the examples of female genius which emanated from the courts of Italy, and, spreading to her universities, installed feminine erudition in professorial chairs. Nor was this questionable practice limited within the Italian peninsula. Many Spanish dames were conspicuous in scholarship, and, at the close of the century, Salamanca and Alcala saw their professorships held with applause by ladies equally distinguished for birth and accomplishments.

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WERE the lettered court of Duke Federigo to be judged by its minstrels, a harsh sentence might perhaps be awarded. Nor would this be quite fair. Their cold and common-place ideas, their rude and vapid verses, are indeed far beneath the standard of our fastidious age, and scarcely repay those who decipher them in venerable parchments. Yet have we ample evidence of their superiority to many poetasters of Italy, who then emulated Virgil's hexameters, or abused the facilities of their vernacular versification; and it is just the fact of these laureates of Urbino so long surviving the countless rhymers of other principalities, that proves the discriminating patronage of a sovereign, who attached to his court the best writers of his time. Nor must we fail to remember that the now prominent blemishes of their works were then their most admired qualities. The classical sympathies which we usually leave in schools and colleges, or which, when carried prominently about us in the busy world are stigmatised as a pedantic and ungraceful encumbrance, were then in high fashion. They were indispensable to the man of liberal education as his sword and buckler to the soldier; they were adopted among the conventional elements of all literature, poetry, and taste. A standard-131- being thus set up so antipathic to the ideas of our practical age, we are called upon, before proceeding to judgment, to divest ourselves of prejudices which may in their turn become the marvel and ridicule of our posterity.

The inherent defects of that minstrelsy,

"Whose melody gave ease to Petrarch's wounds,"

have been aptly set forth by Roscoe, but he appears to overlook its special adaptation for the Italian tongue. Limited to one theme, which it is required to exhaust in a fixed number of lines, and fettered by the frequent and stated recurrence of a few rhymes, no language less copious and pliant can be woven into a sonnet, without occasionally betraying, in bald, formal, or rugged versification, the torture to which it has been subjected. Again, the constraint and mannerism which often deform this metrical composition in other idioms are here its safeguard from a mellifluous but insipid verbiage, so often fatal to the lyrics of Italy: on a poetry habitually turgid and redundant, terseness is thus absolutely imposed.

With these few words of apology for doggerel hexameters and indifferent sonnets, we shall shortly pass in review some of those who thus wooed the muses in the Montefeltrian court.

Among the most widely known names of this age was Francesco Filelfo, whose venal pen often wantoned in biting lampoons, whose sickening vanity was obtruded in the most repulsive egotism, and whose vagrant habits strangely combined assiduous study with lax morals. In most respects he anticipated the bad notoriety acquired a century later by Pietro Aretino, and like him alternately fawned upon and flagellated princely patrons of literature. Were his life to be written, it would be difficult to extract truth by balancing his own self-vaunting letters against-132- the scurrilous philippics of his untiring enemy Poggio Bracciolini. But we are fortunately spared this task, and may refer to Tiraboschi, Roscoe, and Shepherd for illustrations of his restless existence and fractious temper.[82] In both these respects Gian Maria,[*83] the son, seems to have resembled Francesco the father, whilst he even exceeded him in the number and variety of his compositions. He sought audiences in many cities of Italy and Provence for his prelections in grammar and philosophy, as well as for his improvisations of Latin or Italian verse; and among the numerous patrons he thus courted was the good King René, who bestowed on him the laurel crown, a guerdon which his rude numbers ill-deserved at the hands of that graceful troubadour. Tiraboschi makes no allusion to his intercourse with Duke Federigo, whereof we know little beyond two works which he inscribed to that Prince, and which remain unedited in the Vatican Urbino Library. The former of these, dated at Modena in 1464, was corrected by the author, "doctor in arts and both faculties of law, knight, and poet laureat," he being then in his thirty-eighth year. It is numbered 702, and contains about two thousand five hundred Latin hexameters and pentameters, entitled Martiados, an obvious imitation of his father's Sfortiados. The theme is thus set forth in a dedication to the Duke of Urbino:—

The very moderate anticipations raised by this proemium, which we leave in its rugged original, are not surpassed in the context, dull and common-place as it is in senti-133-ment, prosaic and unpolished in style. Losing sight of his avowed object of keeping apart the deeds of Mars, the ancient divinity, from those of Federigo, his living type, in order to illustrate the parallel which it is his plan to draw between them, he strangely jumbles both; and, following the new-born classicism of the day, he has crammed his rough verses with nearly every name that heathen mythology, history, or geography can muster, in senseless and jarring confusion. With a view to exalt his hero as a second Hercules, he enumerates a series of labours and achievements from his childhood, when he sprang from bed and strangled a snake that had frightened all his attendants. This is followed by a farrago of allegorical struggles, combats, and triumphs over temptations or evil principles, anticipating somewhat the idea of the Pilgrim's Progress, but with this important difference, that the motives, arms, and aids are all borrowed from pagan mythology. So entirely is Federigo lost among the gods and demigods who crowd the stage, that his character or actions are seldom brought on the foreground at all, and never with sufficient idiosyncracy to avail for the development of either. Finally, we find him deified in Olympus, and the epic closes with an empty bravado that none ever more worthily emulated Alcides.

The other MS. of Gian Maria Filelfo which demands a passing note is No. 804 of the same library, and is dated seven years later than the Martiados. It contains some six thousand Italian verses, consisting for the most part of minor poems on a variety of subjects; the volume is dedicated to Federigo, but many of the Canzoni morali are inscribed to distinguished personages, not omitting the Duke's rancorous foe Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, to whose vanity such incense could not have been unpalatable. In treating of religious topics, the author, for the time, and by an effort, lays aside the pagan strain which prevails in his other lays, and though generally-134- selecting the sonnet or terza rima, he thus affects to disclaim all rivalry with their mighty masters:—

Yet there is considerable ambition in the rhythm, and although prolix, like other contemporary compositions, and inflated by superabundant episodes, it is not devoid of occasional poetic feeling. In the dedicatory address he thus speaks of his volume:—

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As we shall give a place in our Appendix to Giovanni Sanzi's judgment upon the painters of his day, we may here insert Filelfo's sonnet to Gentile Bellini.

When compared with contemporary efforts, these specimens, and others which it would be easy to add, deserve a better fate than the neglect to which, in common with most of their author's works, they have been consigned; nor do they bear out the imputation of careless haste, alleged by Tiraboschi as the prevailing error of his very numerous and various productions. The paucity of these which have issued from the press may, however, be taken as confirming that judgment, as well as the suppression of his narrative of the campaign of Finale in 1447, after it had been printed by Muratori for his Scriptores. But poetry may be accounted his forte,—a somewhat remarkable circumstance, considering the unrivalled reputation he established as an improvisatore of verses on any number not exceeding one hundred themes suddenly proposed, as such facility has rarely been conjoined with true poetic fire.

It were to be desired that we knew more of his intercourse with Duke Federigo. In one of his dedicatory-136- epistles, after alluding to the likelihood of that prince reading the work, he, in a vein of fulsome compliment and impudent conceit, complains of neglect from friends, and hints at a visit to Urbino. It is difficult to glean facts from the vague common-places of such letters; but in 1468 he thanks his patron for retaining at his court Demetrio Castreno, a learned Greek fugitive from Constantinople. Equally mannered and cold are his flattery and his condolence, on the death of Countess Battista in 1472. Next year he writes that, having begun a commentary on Federigo's life, and completed two books, he had been induced to submit them to the Duke of Milan, from whom he never could recover the manuscript.

Another protégé of Duke Federigo was Porcellio Pandonio, of Naples,[*84] whose pen was ever at command of the readiest patron, as historiographer or laureate. From his partiality to the designations of bard and secretary to Alfonso of Naples, it would seem that he chiefly rested his fame on his poetical compositions. From this judgment Muratori differs, protesting that in historical narrative none excelled his ease and elegance of diction.[85] Abject classicism, in thought and style, was then a common weakness of the learned; and however correctly Porcellio may have caught the Latin phraseology, it is difficult to get over the jarring effect of an idiom and nomenclature foreign-137- to the times and incidents which it is his object vividly to portray. In his printed work, on the campaigns of 1451-2, between Venice and Milan, he uniformly disguises Sforza and Piccinino, their respective commanders, as Scipio and Hannibal, under which noms de guerre it requires a constant effort to recognise mediæval warriors, or to recollect that we are considering events dating some two thousand years after those who really bore them had been committed to the dust. The same affectation, common to many authors of his day, mars his unpublished writings which we have had occasion to examine in the Vatican Urbino Library, and their authority is greatly impaired by what Muratori well calls "prodigality of praise" to his heroes, that is, to his generous patrons. In a beautifully elaborated MS. (No. 373) he has collected, under the title of Epigrams, nearly fifty effusions in honour of our Duke and Duchess, and of members of their family or court, a favourite theme being the love-inspired longings of Battista for her lord's return from the wars. In the same volume is his Feltria, an epic composed at Rome about 1472, and narrating Federigo's campaigns, from that of 1460-1, under the banner of Pius II., by whose command Porcellio undertook to sing his general's prowess in three thousand Virgilian verses. Its merits may be fairly appreciated from extracts already given,[86] and from this allusion to the state of Italy at the outbreak of the war:—

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This poem, having remained unedited in the Vatican arcana, long escaped the literary historians of the Peninsula, but it has been recently quoted by two writers, Pungileone and Passavant, the former of whom had not seen it.[88] Although, in his dedication to Duke Guidobaldo, composed after 1490, the author accounts for his becoming a painter, as we shall see in chapter xxviii., he gives no further explanation of the motives which inspired the labour of a poem, containing some twenty-four thousand lines, than "that after anxious thought and consideration of such new ideas as offered themselves, I wished to sing in this little used style of terza rima, the story of your most excellent and most renowned father's glorious deeds," whose "brilliant reputation not only was and is well known throughout Italy, but is, if I may say so, the subject of discourse beyond the Caucasus," "not without a conscious blush at the idea of dipping so mean a vessel in the water of this limpid and sparkling spring."-139- With equal modesty, he deprecates all rivalry with the learned commentators who had celebrated the same theme in Latin, limiting the ambition of his "rude and brief compend" to rendering its interest accessible to more ordinary readers; but, looking back upon his twenty-three ample cantos, he fervently thanks the Almighty that an undertaking of so extended time and toil had at length attained its termination, and concludes by "humbly beseeching that you will regard the hero's far-famed actions, rather than the baseness of my style, whose only grace is the sincere devotion of a faithful servant to his lord." A similar tone marks the outset of his Chronicle:—

Compared with contemporary epics, the rhythm is smooth and flowing, and the style dignified, interspersed with highly poetical episodes and finely expressed moral reflections as well as apt illustrations from ancient history and mythology. The epithets, though abundant, are more than usually appropriate, and many terse maxims are happily introduced. Yet, in his object of placing his poem and his hero among the popular literature of the day, Giovanni must have failed, the Vatican MS. being the only known copy. Readers it, however, doubtless had, one of whom has curiously commemorated his admiration by jotting on the margin, "Were you but as good a painter as a poet, who knows!" Modern critics, contrasting his fresco at Cagli with the rhyming Chronicle, would probably arrive at an inverse conclusion, especially were they to pronounce upon the latter from the preamble which called forth that exclamation—an allegorical vision, told in nine weary chapters, wherein figure a motley crowd of mythological and heroic personages belonging to ancient and contemporary times.

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It would occasion much useless repetition to enter here into any detailed analysis of the work, as we have formerly drawn upon its most valuable portions for the history of Duke Federigo. When considering the state of the fine arts, we shall have to notice a very important part of the poem touching upon that subject—an æsthetic episode on the art and artists of his day, which is introduced on occasion of the Duke's visit to Federigo I., Marquis of Mantua. In regard to the merit of this epic, due allowance must be made for the taste of the age. Its great length necessarily infers a tediousness of detail much more adapted to prose than verse, indeed inherently prosaic. Yet it contains not a few continuous passages of sustained beauty, and it would not be difficult to cull many a sparkling thought and bright simile, while from time to time the dull narrative is enlivened by lyric touches and strokes of poetic fancy, adorning sentiments creditable to the genius and the heart of its author, who, with much sweetness of disposition, appears to have possessed endowments beyond his humble sphere. His patriotic indignation at the ceaseless broils and strifes which convulsed his fatherland may supply us with an example or two:—

The following sentiments were likely to find little sympathy among his contemporaries:—

A long and somewhat tedious chapter of moralities on the uncertain tenure of life among princes, introduced after describing the assassination of Galeazzo Maria Duke of Milan, in 1476, opens finely:—

The bland transition from a rigorous winter to balmy Italian spring is thus apostrophised:—

The poet's eloquent tribute to Florentine freedom, and its value to the cause of liberty, must close our sparing extracts.[89]

In Sanzi's Chronicle we seek in vain for the riper beauties of succeeding epics; but the flashes of poetry which it embodies are not the less effective from their simple diction, nor from the comparatively unpolished narrative which they adorn.

No. 699 of the Urbino MSS. contains the collected minor poems and songs of Angelo Galli of Urbino, knight, and secretary to Duke Federigo. They are three hundred and seventy-six in number, all in Italian, and unedited, but beautifully transcribed on vellum by Federigo Veterani. Although varied by the introduction of sacred subjects, most of them are occasional amorous effusions, wherein names of the Montefeltri, Malatesta, Sforza, and other Umbrian families frequently occur. The dates affixed to them extend from 1428 to 1457. It appears that the author attended the Council of Basle in 1442, and he is said by Crescimbeni to have survived until 1496. His mellowed versification is in general superior to that of the age, while his trite and limited matter is pleasingly relieved by many happy turns of thought and graces of language. Though unable to supply any particulars of one who has almost escaped notice, we give place to two specimens of his muse. His canzonet addressed to Caterina, "the noble, beautiful, discreet, charming, gentle, and generous Countess of Urbino," runs thus:

The other is upon Costanza Varana, wife of Alessandro Sforza, and mother of Battista Countess of Urbino.

Federigo Veterani has been repeatedly mentioned as a transcriber of MSS. for Duke Federigo, whom he also served as librarian and secretary, besides being one of the judges at Urbino. Those who have had occasion to examine the library formed by that prince, are well acquainted with his beautiful autograph, and might imagine his whole life to have been spent upon its fair volumes. One of them, containing the Triumphs of Petrarch, No. 351, is subscribed by him, with a memorandum that it was the last of about sixty volumes he had written out before the death of Federigo, which he thus deplores:—

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But, in addition to his miscellaneous avocations, Veterani was a copious versifier. Besides an epic, De Progenie Domus Feretranæ, there are other volumes of poetry, apparently his, remaining unedited in the library,[91] of which he continued custodian until the reign of Francesco Maria I. One of those beautiful manuscripts, the fair vellum and gem-like illuminations of which have been the theme of many a eulogy, contains the collected verses of Cristoforo Landini and six other less-known poets of the fifteenth century. On the concluding page, in a trembling and blotted hand, we read these touching lines, the tribute of its lettered scribe to the temporary eclipse of his sovereign's dynasty:[92]—

"1517.

"Federicus Veteranus, Urbinas Bibliothecarius, ad Rei Memoriam.

Among the minor fry slumbering unknown in the Vatican Library is Urbani of Urbino, who left a few rude elegiac and complimentary ditties in Latin or Italian upon members of the Montefeltrian line, and compiled a confused account of their pedigree. We may also name Antonio Rustico of Florence, whose Panegiricon Comitis Federici, dedicated to him in 1472, contains above seven hundred Italian lines of terza rima, unpolished in style, and in matter a mere tissue of fatiguing verbiage. Scarcely more valuable is Naldio's account of the Volterran campaign of 1572 in Latin verse, to which we have vainly had recourse for new information on that obscure passage of our memoirs.[93]

While enumerating in our twenty-first chapter the celebrities of Duke Guidobaldo's court, we mentioned Bernardo Accolti, and endeavoured to explain the inadequacy of his published works to sustain his contemporary reputation, by supposing that his strength lay in extemporé recitation. The high place which his vanity claimed, in assuming "the Unique" as a surname, appears to have been freely accorded by the most able of his contemporaries. Ariosto says of him, not perhaps without a sneer at his notorious conceit,—

Castiglione assigns him a prominent rank among the Urbino stars, whilst Bembo and Pietro Aretino testify to-147- his merits. We, however, would try these by his surviving works, which, as Roscoe observes, are fatal to his reputation, and which are indeed rather a beacon than a model to succeeding genius. It is, therefore, unnecessary to pause upon them, or to add here to our previous notice of their author and his position at the Montefeltrian court. Nor was Accolti the only poetaster who attained in that polished circle, or in other Italian courtlets, a celebrity from which posterity has withheld its seal. A solution of this success may perhaps be found in the circumstance that many of these owed it either to personal popularity or to their musical accomplishments. Thus Serafino d'Aquila, who either improviséed his verses, or chanted them to his own accompaniment on the lute, was generally preferred to Petrarch. He died at thirty-four, in 1500, after being sought by all the petty sovereigns from Milan to Naples, and ere two generations had passed away his poetry was utterly forgotten. So, too, Agostino Staccoli of Urbino, whose sonnets delighted Duke Federigo, and obtained for him a diplomatic mission to Rome in 1485, has been long consigned to oblivion.

The older comedies of Italy become a subject of interest to us, for one of the earliest was written by Bernardo Bibbiena, a friend of Guidobaldo I.,[95] and was first performed in the palace of Urbino. The revival of the comic drama may be traced to Ferrara; and, though the pieces originally represented there before Duke Ercole I. were translations from Plautus and Terence,[96] Ariosto made several boyish attempts to vary the entertainment by dramatic compositions of his own. This was just before 1500, and to about the same time Tiraboschi ascribes the comedies of Machiavelli. There is thus much probability that these attempts preceded the Calandra of Bibbiena,-148- which has, however, been generally considered the oldest regular comedy in the language. It seems also to have been the first that attracted the notice of his patron Leo X., whose delight in comic performances was excessive; and, although now superseded by pieces more in accordance with the age, it long enjoyed a continued popularity. Giovo celebrates its easy and acute wit, and the talent of its mobile and merry author for scenic representation, which must have greatly tended to ensure its success. It is doubtful in what year it was played at the Vatican in presence of his Holiness, on the visit of Isabella, Marchioness of Mantua, when the decorations painted by Baldassar Peruzzi obtained unbounded applause. But this probably happened after its performance at Urbino, which collateral evidence discovered by Pungileone, has fixed as taking place in the spring of 1513.[*97] This gorgeous entertainment, and the scenery executed for it by Timoteo della Vite and Girolamo Genga, are commemorated in a letter of Castiglione, which throws light upon the manner of such festivities in that mountain metropolis.

Though much of this detail regards the accompanying entertainment more than the comedy, it cannot be deemed out of place, as illustrative of the way in which these were managed in a court where we have frequent occasion to allude to such pastimes: the preceding description fully explains the often-mentioned moresca, and almost entitles us to translate that word by the better known French ballet. The Calandra continued to be played on select occasions in Italy, and we hear of its being produced at Lyons in 1548, before Catherine de' Medici and her husband, whose largess to the actors exceeded 2500 crowns.

This piece, though improved in incidents, is avowedly indebted for its plot to the Menecmo of Plautus, a comedy already popular through a translation performed at Ferrara, in 1486-7, by the children and courtiers of Ercole I., in a theatre built on purpose within the palace-yard, and costing with its decorations 1000 ducats. In regard to its proper merits, no one can deny the amusing complexity of the plot, the constant succession of absurd mistakes among the personages, the ingenious contrivances by which these are alternately occasioned and extricated, the bustle of the entertainment, and the racy humour of the dialogue. In order to let these be appreciated, an analysis larger than our space can permit would be necessary, and neither the character nor the wit of the piece could be preserved without introducing intrigues and language repugnant to modern decency. Ginguené has conveyed a tolerable idea of the comedy without greatly shocking the reader, but has consequently suppressed much of its fun, and to his pages we must refer-153- for detail.[98] The story turns upon the adventures of twins, a brother and sister, who, perfectly resembling in person, but unknown to each other, are simultaneously parties to love intrigues, carried on through the agency of a clever valet, and at the cost of a drivelling husband (Calandro) in the course of which they frequently interchange the dress and character of their respective sexes, a magician being ever at hand to bear the blame of what appear physical transmutations, and a double marriage of course happily solving all embarrassments. Although unquestionably rich in the materials of broad farce, it is evident that such a plot is but indifferently adapted for embodying manners sketched from life.