Pleasant Count Baldassare Castiglione! whose incomparable book of the “Cortigiano” succeeded in teaching his countrymen every gentlemanly grace but virtue.  He was born at Casatico in the Mantovano, in the year 1476, and went in his boyhood to be schooled at Milan, where he learnt the profession of arms.  From Milan he went to Rome, where he exercised his profession of arms till the year 1504, when he was called to gentler uses at the court of the elegant Dukes of Urbino.  He lived there as courtier and court-poet, and he returned to Rome as the ambassador from Urbino.  Meantime his liege, Francesco Gonzaga, was but poorly pleased that so brilliant a Mantuan should spend his life in the service and ornament of other princes, and Castiglione came back to his native country about the year 1516.  He married in Mantua, and there finished his famous book of “The Courtier,” and succeeded in winning back the favor of his prince.  Federico, the Duke, made him ambassador to Rome in 1528; and Baldassare did his master two signal services there,—­he procured him to be named head of all the Papal forces, and he found him Giulio Romano.  So the Duke suffered him to go as the Pope’s Nuncio to Spain, and Baldassare finished his courtly days at Toledo in 1529.

The poet made a detour to Mantua on his way to Spain, taking with him the painter, whom the Duke received with many caresses, as Vasari says, presented him a house honorably furnished, ordered provision for him and his pupils, gave them certain brave suits of velvet and satin, and, seeing that Giulio had no horse, called for his own favorite Luggieri, and bestowed it on him.  Ah! they knew how to receive painters, those fine princes, who had merely to put their hands into their people’s pocket, and take out what florins they liked.  So the Duke presently set the artist to work, riding out with him through the gate of San Bastiano to some stables about a bow-shot from the walls, in the midst of a flat meadow, where he told Giulio that he would be glad (if it could be done without destroying the old walls) to have such buildings added to the stables as would serve him for a kind of lodge, to come out and merrily sup in when he liked.  Whereupon Giulio began to think out the famous Palazzo del T.

This painter is an unlucky kind of man, to whom all criticism seems to have agreed to attribute great power and deny great praise.  Castiglione had found him at Rome, after the death of his master Raphael, when his genius, for good or for ill, began for the first time to find original expression.  At Mantua, where he spent all the rest of his busy life, it is impossible not to feel in some degree the force of this genius.  As in Venice all the Madonnas in the street-corner shrines have some touch of color to confess the painter’s subjection to Titian or Tintoretto; as in Vicenza the edifices are all in Greekish taste, and stilted upon pedestals in honor and homage to Palladio; as in Parma Correggio has never