that the Princes of Urbino, with such materials to draw from, sold their service and their troops to Florence, Rome, S. Mark, and Milan.  The bearing of these peasants is still soldierly and proud.  Yet they are not sullen or forbidding like the Sicilians, whose habits of life, for the rest, much resemble theirs.  The villages, there as here, are few and far between, perched high on rocks, from which the folk descend to till the ground and reap the harvest.  But the southern brusquerie and brutality are absent from this district.  The men have something of the dignity and slow-eyed mildness of their own huge oxen.  As evening fell, more solemn Apennines upreared themselves to southward.  The Monte d’Asdrubale, Monte Nerone, and Monte Catria hove into sight.  At last, when light was dim, a tower rose above the neighbouring ridge, a broken outline of some city barred the sky-line.  Urbino stood before us.  Our long day’s march was at an end.

The sunset was almost spent, and a four days’ moon hung above the western Apennines, when we took our first view of the palace.  It is a fancy-thralling work of wonder seen in that dim twilight; like some castle reared by Atlante’s magic for imprisonment of Ruggiero, or palace sought in fairyland by Astolf winding his enchanted horn.  Where shall we find its like, combining, as it does, the buttressed battlemented bulk of mediaeval strongholds with the airy balconies, suspended gardens, and fantastic turrets of Italian pleasure-houses?  This unique blending of the feudal past with the Renaissance spirit of the time when it was built, connects it with the art of Ariosto—­or more exactly with Boiardo’s epic.  Duke Federigo planned his palace at Urbino just at the moment when the Count of Scandiano had began to chaunt his lays of Roland in the Castle of Ferrara.  Chivalry, transmuted by the Italian genius into something fanciful and quaint, survived as a frail work of art.  The men-at-arms of the Condottieri still glittered in gilded hauberks.  Their helmets waved with plumes and bizarre crests.  Their surcoats blazed with heraldries; their velvet caps with medals bearing legendary emblems.  The pomp and circumstance of feudal war had not yet yielded to the cannon of the Gascon or the Switzer’s pike.  The fatal age of foreign invasions had not begun for Italy.  Within a few years Charles VIII.’s holiday excursion would reveal the internal rottenness and weakness of her rival states, and the peninsula for half a century to come would be drenched in the blood of Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, fighting for her cities as their prey.  But now Lorenzo de’ Medici was still alive.  The famous policy which bears his name held Italy suspended for a golden time in false tranquillity and independence.  The princes who shared his culture and his love of art were gradually passing into modern noblemen, abandoning the savage feuds and passions of more virile centuries, yielding to luxury and scholarly enjoyments.  The castles were becoming courts, and despotisms won by force were settling into dynasties.