II., we read of the Jews being condemned to pay the wages of the Duke’s archers for the extremely improbable crime of killing some Hebrews who had been converted; and there is account of the Duchess going on foot to the sanctuary of Our Lady of Grace, to render thanks for her son’s recovery from a fever, and her daughter’s recovery from the bite of a monkey.  Mantua must also have regained something of its former gayety; for in 1652 the Austrian Archdukes and the Medici spent Carnival there.  Carlo II. died, like his father, with suspicions of poisoning, and undoubted evidences of debauchery.  He was a generous and amiable prince; and, though a shameless profligate, was beloved by his subjects, with whom, no doubt, his profligacy was not a reproach.

Ferdinand Carlo, whose ignoble reign lasted from 1665 to 1708, was the last and basest of his race.  The histories of his country do not attribute a single virtue to this unhappy prince, who seems to have united in himself all the vices of all the Gonzagas.  He was licentious and depraved as the first Vincenzo, and he had not Vincenzo’s courage; he was luxurious as the second Francesco, but had none of his generosity; he taxed his people heavily that he might meanly enjoy their substance without making them even the poor return of national glory; he was grasping as Guglielmo, but saved nothing to the state; he was as timid as the second Vincenzo, and yet made a feint of making war, and went to Hungary at one time to fight against the Turk.  But he loved far better to go to Venice in his gilded barge, and to spend his Carnivals amid the infinite variety of that city’s dissoluteness.  He was so ignorant as scarcely to be able to write his name; but he knew all vicious things from his cradle, as if, indeed, he had been gifted to know them by instinct through the profligacy of his parents.  It is said that even the degraded Mantuans blushed to be ruled by so dull and ignorant a wretch; but in his time, nevertheless, Mantua was all rejoicings, promenades, pleasure-voyages, and merry-makings.  “The Duke recruited women from every country to stock his palace,” says an Italian author, “where they played, sang, and made merry at his will and theirs.”  “In Venice,” says Volta, “he surrendered himself to such diversions without shame, or stint of expense.  He not only took part in all public entertainments and pleasures of that capital, but he held a most luxurious and gallant court of his own; and all night long his palace was the scene of theatrical representations by dissolute women, with music and banqueting, so that he had a worse name than Sardanapalus of old.”  He sneaked away to these gross delights in 1700, while the Emperor was at war with the Spaniards, and left his Duchess (a brave and noble woman, the daughter of Ferrante Gonzaga, Duke of Guastalla) to take care of the duchy, then in great part occupied by Spanish and French forces.  This was the War of the Spanish Succession; and it used up poor Ferdinand, who had