ns through the streets of Milan, visiting the churches and
convents that were rising on all sides, the new hospital, which was the
object of Madonna Bianca's tender care, the oak avenues and gardens with
which she loved to surround her favourite shrines. We find the boys at
home, helping their mother to entertain her guests with music and
dancing, and accompanying her on visits to the noble Milanese families.
One day their grandmother, Agnese di Maino, came to see the duke's sons
with an old gentleman from Navarre, who went home declaring that he had
never seen such wise and well-educated children; another time we hear of
a Madonna Giovanna coming to spend the day at the palace, and dancing
all the evening with Lodovico Maria; and when the duchess took her
younger children to visit Don Tommaseo de' Rieti, general laughter was
excited by the little four-year-old Ascanio, the future cardinal, who
walked straight up to a portrait of the duke, exclaiming, "There is my
lord father!" When the newly elected Pope Pius II., who as Eneas Sylvius
Piccolomini had often been in Milan, came to visit the duke in 1457, he
found Galeazzo reading Cicero, and his little brothers with their
cherub faces sitting round their tutor, intent on his discourse; while
on one occasion their sister Ippolita, the pupil of the great
Constantine Lascaris, pronounced a Latin oration in honour of His
Holiness. On Christmas day, a festival which was always celebrated with
much pomp at Milan, each of the duke's four elder sons came forward and
recited a Latin speech, and Lodovico delighted all who were present by
the ease and grace of his bearing, and the eloquent periods in which he
extolled his father's great deeds in peace and war.

The duke himself always singled out Lodovico for especial notice, and
said the boy would do great things. It was, no doubt, his sense of the
youthful Moro's talents that made Francesco choose him, at the age of
thirteen, to be the leader of the body of three thousand men which were
to join in the Crusade preached by Pope Pius II. On the 2nd of June,
1464, the ducal standard, bearing the golden lion of the house of Sforza
and the adder of the Visconti, was solemnly committed to the charge of
the young Crusader, before the eyes of the whole court, on the piazza in
front of the old palace, which was gaily decorated for the occasion with
garlands and tapestries. But the Pope died, and the idea of the Crusade
was abandoned. Lodovi