cities, and at last married a second time, taking to wife Margherita Malatesta.  He was a prince of high and generous soul and of manly greatness rare in his time.  There came once a creature of the Visconti to him, with a plot for secretly taking off his masters; but the Gonzaga (he must have been thought an eccentric man by his neighbors) dismissed the wretch with scornful horror.  I am sure the reader will be glad to know that he finally beat the Visconti in fair fight, and (the pest still raging in Mantua) lived to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.  When he returned, he compiled the city’s statutes, divided the town into four districts, and named its streets.  So he died.

And after this prince had made his end, there came another Francesco, or Gianfrancesco, who was created Marquis of Mantua by the Emperor Sigismund.  He was a friend of war, and having been the ward of the Venetian Republic (Venice was fond of this kind of trust, and sometimes adopted princely persons as her children, among whom the reader will of course remember the Queen of Cyprus, and the charming Bianca Capello, whose personal attractions and singularly skillful knowledge of the use of poisons made her Grand Duchess of Tuscany some years after she eloped from Venice), he became the leader of her armies on the death of Carmagnola, who survived the triumphal reception given him by the Serenest Senate only a very short time. [It seems scarcely worth while to state the fact that Carmagnola, suspected of treasonable correspondence with the Visconti, was recalled to Venice to receive distinguished honors from the republic.  The Senate was sitting in the hall of the Grand Council when he appeared, and they detained him there with various compliments till night fell.  Then instead of lights, the Sbirri appeared, and seized Carmagnola.  “I am a dead man,” he exclaimed, on beholding them.  And so indeed he was; for, three days after, he was led out of prison, and beheaded between the pillars of the Piazzetta.] The Gonzaga took Verona and Padua for the republic, and met the Milanese in many battles.  Venice was then fat and insolently profuse with the spoils of the Orient, and it is probable that the Marquis of Mantua acquired there that taste for splendor which he introduced into his hitherto frugal little state.  We read of his being in Venice in 1414, when the Jewelers and Goldsmiths’ Guild gave a tournament in the Piazza San Marco, offering as prizes to the victorious lances a collar enriched with pearls and diamonds, the work of the jewelers, and two helmets excellently wrought by the goldsmiths.  On this occasion the Gonzaga, with two hundred and sixty Mantuan gentlemen, mounted on superb horses, contested the prizes with the Marquis of Ferrara, at the head of two hundred Ferrarese, equally mounted, and attended by their squires and pages, magnificently dressed.  There were sixty thousand spectators of the encounter.  “Both the Marquises,” says Mutinelli in his “Annali Urbani,” “being each assisted by fourteen well-armed cavaliers, combated valorously at the barrier, and were both judged worthy of the first prize:  a Mantuan cavalier took the second.”