thing 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 dependants 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 at this juncture pressed
Francesco Maria hard; and in 1624 the last Duke of Urbino devolved his
lordships to the Holy See. He survived the formal act of abdication
seven years; when he died, the Pontiff added his duchy to the Papal
States, which thenceforth stretched from Naples to the bounds of Venice
on the Po.

III