philosophical composure, recording the event in his diary as something to be dryly grateful for.  Left alone, the Duke abandoned himself to solitude, religious exercises, hunting, and the economy of his impoverished dominions.  He became that curious creature, a man of narrow nature and mediocre capacity, who, dedicated to the cult of self, is fain to pass for saint and sage in easy circumstances.  He married, for the second time, a lady, Livia della Rovere, who belonged to his own family, but had been born in private station.  She brought him one son, the Prince Federigo-Ubaldo.  This youth might have sustained the ducal honours of Urbino, but for his sage-saint father’s want of wisdom.  The boy was a spoiled child in infancy.  Inflated with Spanish vanity from the cradle, taught to regard his subjects as dependents on a despot’s will, abandoned to the caprices of his own ungovernable temper, without substantial aid from the paternal piety or stoicism, he rapidly became a most intolerable princeling.  His father married him, while yet a boy, to Claudia de’ Medici, and virtually abdicated in his favour.  Left to his own devices, Federigo chose companions from the troupes of players whom he drew from Venice.  He filled his palaces with harlots, and degraded himself upon the stage in parts of mean buffoonery.  The resources of the duchy were racked to support these parasites.  Spanish rules of etiquette and ceremony were outraged by their orgies.  His bride brought him one daughter, Vittoria, who afterwards became the wife of Ferdinand, Grand Duke of Tuscany.  Then in the midst of his low dissipation and offences against ducal dignity, he died of apoplexy at the early age of eighteen—­the victim, in the severe judgment of history, of his father’s selfishness and want of practical ability.

This happened in 1623.  Francesco Maria was stunned by the blow.  His withdrawal from the duties of the sovereignty in favour of such a son had proved a constitutional unfitness for the duties of his station.  The life he loved was one of seclusion in a round of pious exercises, petty studies, peddling economies, and mechanical amusements.  A powerful and grasping Pope was on the throne of Rome.  Urban at this juncture pressed Francesco Maria hard; and in 1624 the last Duke of Urbino devolved his lordships to the Holy See.  He survived the formal act of abdication seven years; when he died, the Pontiff added his duchy to the Papal States, which thenceforth stretched from Naples to the bounds of Venice on the Po.

III

Duke Frederick began the palace at Urbino in 1454, when he was still only Count.  The architect was Luziano of Lauranna, a Dalmatian; and the beautiful white limestone, hard as marble, used in the construction, was brought from the Dalmatian coast.  This stone, like the Istrian stone of Venetian buildings, takes and retains the chisel mark with wonderful precision.  It looks as though, when fresh, it must have had the pliancy of clay, so delicately are the finest curves in scroll or foliage scooped from its substance.  And yet it preserves each cusp and angle of the most elaborate pattern with the crispness and the sharpness of a crystal.