bravo in torch-litten palace rooms with twenty poignard strokes ’twixt waist and throat, and their Pandarus shall be sent down to his account by a varlet’s coltellata through the midriff.  Imagination shifts the scene, and shows in that same loggia Rome’s warlike Pope, attended by his cardinals and all Urbino’s chivalry.  The snowy beard of Julius flows down upon his breast, where jewels clasp the crimson mantle, as in Raphael’s picture.  His eyes are bright with wine; for he has come to gaze on sunset from the banquet-chamber, and to watch the line of lamps which soon will leap along that palace cornice in his honour.  Behind him lies Bologna humbled.  The Pope returns, a conqueror, to Rome.  Yet once again imagination is at work.  A gaunt, bald man, close-habited in Spanish black, his spare, fine features carved in purest ivory, leans from that balcony.  Gazing with hollow eyes, he tracks the swallows in their flight, and notes that winter is at hand.  This is the last Duke of Urbino, Francesco Maria II., he whose young wife deserted him, who made for himself alone a hermit-pedant’s round of petty cares and niggard avarice and mean-brained superstition.  He drew a second consort from the convent, and raised up seed unto his line by forethought, but beheld his princeling fade untimely in the bloom of boyhood.  Nothing is left but solitude.  To the mortmain of the Church reverts Urbino’s lordship, and even now he meditates the terms of devolution.  Jesuits cluster in the rooms behind, with comfort for the ducal soul and calculations for the interests of Holy See.

A farewell to these memories of Urbino’s dukedom should be taken in the crypt of the cathedral, where Francesco Maria II., the last Duke, buried his only son and all his temporal hopes.  The place is scarcely solemn.  Its dreary barocco emblems mar the dignity of death.  A bulky Pieta by Gian Bologna, with Madonna’s face unfinished, towers up and crowds the narrow cell.  Religion has evanished from this late Renaissance art, nor has the afterglow of Guido Reni’s hectic piety yet overflushed it.  Chilled by the stifling humid sense of an extinct race here entombed in its last representative, we gladly emerge from the sepulchral vault into the air of day.

Filippo Visconti, with a smile on his handsome face, is waiting for us at the inn.  His horses, sleek, well fed, and rested, toss their heads impatiently.  We take our seats in the carriage, open wide beneath a sparkling sky, whirl past the palace and its ghost-like recollections, and are halfway on the road to Fossombrone in a cloud of dust and whirr of wheels before we think of looking back to greet Urbino.  There is just time.  The last decisive turning lies in front.  We stand bareheaded to salute the grey mass of buildings ridged along the sky.  Then the open road invites us with its varied scenery and movement.  From the shadowy past we drive into the world of human things, for ever changefully unchanged, unrestfully the same.  This interchange between dead memories and present life is the delight of travel.