from Ferrara, where the black heretic himself was then, or about then, in hiding under the protection of the ill-advised Marchioness Renee.  The good Cardinal received the Pope’s applause for his energy in this matter, and I doubt not his hand fell heavily on the Calvinists.  Of the Duke who died so young, the Venetian ambassador thought it worth while to write what I think it worth while to quote, as illustrating the desire of the Senate to have careful knowledge of its neighbors:  “He is a boy of melancholy complexion.  His eyes are full of spirit, but he does not delight in childish things, and seems secretly proud of being lord.  He has an excellent memory, and shows much inclination for letters.”

His brother Guglielmo, who succeeded him in 1550, seems to have had the same affection for learning; but he was willful, harsh, and cruelly ambitious, and cared, an old writer says, for nothing so much as perpetuating the race of the Gonzagas in Mantua.  He was a hunchback, and some of his family (who could not have understood his character) tried to persuade him not to assume the ducal dignity; but his haughty temper soon righted him in their esteem, and it is said that all the courtiers put on humps in honor of the Duke.  He was not a great warrior, and there are few picturesque incidents in his reign.  Indeed, nearly the last of these in Mantuan history was the coronation at Mantua of the excellent poet Lodovico Ariosto, by Charles V., in 1532, Federico II. reigning.  But the Mantuans of Guglielmo’s day were not without their sensations, for three Japanese ambassadors passed through their city on the way to Rome.  They were also awakened to religious zeal by the reappearance of Protestantism among them.  The heresy was happily suppressed by the Inquisition, acting under Pius V., though with small thanks to Duke William, who seems to have taken no fervent part in the persecutions.  “The proceedings,” says Cantu, writing before slavery had been abolished, “were marked by those punishments which free America inflicts upon the negroes to-day, and which a high conception of the mission of the Church moves us to deplore.”  The Duke must have made haste after this to reconcile himself with the Church; for we read that two years later he was permitted to take a particle of the blood of Christ from the church of St. Andrea to that of Sta.  Barbara, where he deposited it in a box of crystal and gold, and caused his statue to be placed before the shrine in the act of adoring the relic.

Duke William managed his finances so well as to leave his spendthrift son Vincenzo a large sum of money to make away with after his death.  Part of this, indeed, he had earned by obedience to his father’s wishes in the article of matrimony.  The prince was in love with the niece of the Duke of Bavaria, very lovely and certainly high-born enough, but having unhappily only sixty thousand crowns to her portion.  So she was not to be thought of, and Vincenzo married