onfidence he wormed himself,
pretending to play the spy upon the exiles, and affecting a personal
timidity which put the Prince off his guard. Alessandro called him
'the philosopher,' because he conversed in solitude with his own
thoughts and seemed indifferent to wealth and office. But all this
while Lorenzino was plotting how to murder him.

Giovio's account of this strange intimacy may be added, since it
completes the picture I have drawn from Varchi:--'Lorenzo made himself
the accomplice and instrument of those amorous amusements for which
the Duke had an insatiable appetite, with the object of deceiving him.
He was singularly well furnished with all the scoundrelly arts and
trained devices of the pander's trade; composed fine verses to incite
to lust; wrote and represented comedies in Italian; and pretended
to take pleasure only in such tricks and studies. Therefore he never
carried arms like other courtiers, and feigned to be afraid of blood,
a man who sought tranquillity at any price. Besides, he bore a pallid
countenance and melancholy brow, walking alone, talking very little
and with few persons. He haunted solitary places apart from the city,
and showed such plain signs of hypochondria that some began covertly
to pass jokes on him. Certain others, who were more acute, suspected
that he was harbouring and devising in his mind some terrible
enterprise.' The Prologue to Lorenzino's own comedy of 'Aridosiso'
brings the sardonic, sneering, ironical man vividly before us.
He calls himself 'un certo omiciatto, che non e nessun di voi che
veggendolo non l'avesse a noia, pensando che egli abbia fatto una
commedia;' and begs the audience to damn his play to save him the
tedium of writing another. Criticised by the light of his subsequent
actions, this prologue may even be understood to contain a covert
promise of the murder he was meditating.

'In this way,' writes Varchi, 'the Duke had taken such familiarity
with Lorenzo, that, not content with making use of him as a ruffian
in his dealings with women, whether religious or secular, maidens
or wives or widows, noble or plebeian, young or elderly, as it might
happen, he applied to him to procure for his pleasure a half-sister of
Lorenzo's own mother, a young lady of marvellous beauty, but not less
chaste than beautiful, who was the wife of Lionardo Ginori, and lived
not far from the back entrance to the palace of the Medici.' Lorenzino
undertook this odious commission,