n such seclusion as mine.

This was that fine poet Annibale Caro, whom I have heard judged to be
all but the equal of the great Petrarca himself. A man who had less the
air of a poet it would not be easy to conceive. He was of middle height
and of a habit of body inclining to portliness, and his age may have
been forty. His face was bearded, ruddy, and small-featured, and there
was about him an air of smug prosperity; he was dressed with care, but
he had none of the splendour of the Cardinal or my cousin. Let me add
that he was secretary to the Duke Pier Luigi Farnese, and that he was
here in Piacenza on a mission to the Governor in which his master's
interests were concerned.

The other two who completed that company are of no account, and indeed
their names escape me, though I seem to remember that one was named
Pacini and that he was said to be a philosopher of considerable parts.

Bidden to table by Messer Fifanti, I took the chair he offered me beside
his lady, and presently came the old servant whom already I had seen,
bearing meat for me. I was hungry, and I fell to with zest, what time
a pleasant ripple of talk ran round the board. Facing me sat my cousin,
and I never observed until my hunger was become less clamorous with what
an insistence he regarded me. At last, however, our eyes met across the
board. He smiled that crooked, somewhat unpleasant smile of his.

"And so, Ser Agostino, they are to make a priest of you?" said he.

"God pleasing," I answered soberly, and perhaps shortly.

"And if his brains at all resemble his body," lisped the
Cardinal-legate, "you may live to see an Anguissola Pope, my Cosimo."

My stare must have betrayed my amazement at such words. "Not so,
magnificent," I made answer. "I am destined for the life monastic."

"Monastic!" quoth he, in a sort of horror, and looking as if a bad smell
had suddenly been thrust under his nose. He shrugged and pouted and
had fresh recourse to his pomander. "O, well! Friars have become popes
before to-day."

"I am to enter the hermit order of St. Augustine," I again corrected.

"Ah!" said Caro, in his big, full voice. "He aspires not to Rome but to
Heaven, my lord."

"Then what the devil does he in your house, Fifanti?" quoth the
Cardinal. "Are you to teach him sanctity?"

And the table shook with laughter at a jest I did not understand any
more than I understood my Lord Cardinal.

Messer Fifanti, sitting at the table-head, shot me a glan