his disposal forced Federigo to give the
building an irregular outline. The fine facade, with its embayed _logge_
and flanking turrets, is placed too close upon the city ramparts for its
due effect. We are obliged to cross the deep ravine which separates it
from a lower quarter of the town, and take our station near the Oratory
of S. Giovanni Battista, before we can appreciate the beauty of its
design, or the boldness of the group it forms with the cathedral dome
and tower and the square masses of numerous out-buildings. Yet this
peculiar position of the palace, though baffling to a close observer of
its details, is one of singular advantage to the inhabitants. Set on the
verge of Urbino's towering eminence, it fronts a wave-tossed sea of
vales and mountain summits toward the rising and the setting sun. There
is nothing but illimitable air between the terraces and loggias of the
Duchess's apartments and the spreading pyramid of Monte Catria.

A nobler scene is nowhere swept from palace windows than this, which
Castiglione touched in a memorable passage at the end of his
_Cortegiano_. To one who in our day visits Urbino, it is singular how
the slight indications of this sketch, as in some silhouette, bring back
the antique life, and link the present with the past--a hint, perhaps,
for reticence in our descriptions. The gentlemen and ladies of the court
had spent a summer night in long debate on love, rising to the height of
mystical Platonic rapture on the lips of Bembo, when one of them
exclaimed, "The day has broken!" "He pointed to the light which was
beginning to enter by the fissures of the windows. Whereupon we flung
the casements wide upon that side of the palace which looks toward the
high peak of Monte Catria, and saw that a fair dawn of rosy hue was born
already in the eastern skies, and all the stars had vanished except the
sweet regent of the heaven of Venus, who holds the borderlands of day
and night; and from her sphere it seemed as though a gentle wind were
breathing, filling the air with eager freshness, and waking among the
numerous woods upon the neighbouring hills the sweet-toned symphonies of
joyous birds."

II.

The House of Montefeltro rose into importance early in the twelfth
century. Frederick Barbarossa erected their fief into a county in 1160.
Supported by imperial favour, they began to exercise an undefined
authority over the district, which they afterwards converted into a
duchy. But, th