s
old comrade, Don John of Austria. His father forced him to an
uncongenial marriage with Lucrezia d'Este, Princess of Ferrara. She
left him, and took refuge in her native city, then honoured by the
presence of Tasso and Guarini. He bore her departure with
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