cy must excuse my attempting to paint the private character of
her Highness. Such facts as I have reported are of public notoriety, but
to exceed them would be an unwarranted presumption. I know she has the
name of being affable to her dependents, capable of a fitful generosity,
and easily moved by distress; and it is certain that her domestic
situation has been one to excite pity and disarm criticism.

"With regard to his Highness, it is difficult either to detect his
motives or to divine his preferences. His youth was spent in pious
practices; and a curious reason is given for the origin of this habit.
He was educated, as your excellency is doubtless aware, by a French
philosopher of the school of Hobbes; and it is said that in the interval
of his tasks the poor Duke, bewildered by his governor's distinctions
between conception and cognition, and the object and the sentient, used
to spend his time praying the saints to assist him in his atheistical
studies; indeed a satire of the day ascribes him as making a novena to
the Virgin to obtain a clearer understanding of the universality of
matter. Others with more likelihood aver that he frequented the churches
to escape from the tyranny of his pedagogue; and it is certain that from
one cause or another his education threw him into the opposite extreme
of a superstitious and mechanical piety. His marriage, his differences
with the Duchess, and the evil influence of Cerveno, exposed him to new
temptations, and for a time he led a life which seemed to justify the
worst charges of the enemies of materialism. Recent events have flung
him back on the exaggerated devotion of his youth, and now, when his
health permits, he spends his time serving mass, singing in the choir at
benediction and making pilgrimages to the relics of the saints in the
different churches of the duchy.

"A few years since, at the instigation of his confessor, he destroyed
every picture in the ducal gallery that contained any naked figure or
represented any subject offensive to religion. Among them was Titian's
famous portrait of Duke Ascanio's mistress, known as the Goldsmith's
Daughter, and a Venus by the Venetian painter Giorgione, so highly
esteemed in its day that Pope Leo X. is said to have offered in exchange
for it the gift of a papal benefice, and a Cardinal's hat for Duke
Guidobaldo's younger son. His Highness, moreover, impedes the
administration of justice by resisting all attempts to restrict