be assassinated by his friend Francesco Guidalotti.  It will be noticed that he proceeded slowly and surely in the case of each annexation, licking over his prey after he had throttled it and before he swallowed it, like a boa-constrictor.

There remained no power in Italy, except the Republic of Florence and the exiled but invincible Francesco da Carrara, to withstand his further progress.  Florence delayed his conquests in Tuscany.  Francesco managed to return to Padua.  Still the peril which threatened the whole of Italy was imminent.  The Duke of Milan was in the plenitude of manhood—­rich, prosperous, and full of mental force.  His acquisitions were well cemented; his armies in good condition; his treasury brim full; his generals highly paid.  All his lieutenants in city and in camp respected the iron will and the deep policy of the despot who swayed their action from his arm-chair in Milan.  He alone knew how to use the brains and hands that did him service, to keep them mutually in check, and by their regulated action to make himself not one but a score of men.  At last, when all other hope of independence for Italy had failed, the plague broke out with fury in Lombardy.  Gian Galeazzo retired to his isolated fortress of Marignano in order to escape infection.  Yet there in 1402 he sickened.  A comet appeared in the sky, to which he pointed as a sign of his approaching death—­’God could not but signalize the end of so supreme a ruler,’ he told his attendants.  He died aged 55.  Italy drew a deep breath.  The danger was passed.

The systematic plan conceived by Gian Galeazzo for the enslavement of Italy, the ability and force of intellect which sustained him in its execution, and the power with which he bent men to his will, are scarcely more extraordinary than the sudden dissolution of his dukedom at his death.  Too timid to take the field himself, he had trained in his service a band of great commanders, among whom Alberico da Barbino, Facino Cane, Pandolfo Malatesta, Jacopo dal Verme, Gabrino Fondulo, and Ottobon Terzo were the most distinguished.  As long as he lived and held them in leading strings, all went well.  But at his death his two sons were still mere boys.  He had to intrust their persons, together with the conduct of his hardly won dominions, to these captains in conjunction with the Duchess Catherine and a certain Francesco Barbavara.  This man had been the Duke’s body-servant, and was now the paramour of the Duchess.  The generals refused to act with them; and each seized upon such portions of the Visconti inheritance as he could most easily acquire.  The vast tyranny of the first Duke of Milan fell to pieces in a day.  The whole being based on no legal right, but held together artificially by force and skill, its constituent parts either reasserted their independence or became the prey of adventurers.[1] Many scions of the old ejected families recovered their authority in the subject towns.  We hear