"Most holy Father! turn thy face away
From this so needless and destructive war,
Which direst ills on Italy entails:
Thy pastor's hand put forth that rose to pluck,
Ere others reap its glory: be invoked
With sov'reign and paternal care to free,
From discipline so ruinous and harsh,
Rome, and the dwellers in Ausonia's lands,
Whose bootless passions, pitiably wrecked,
In suicidal outrage spend themselves,
With benefit to none. While time remains,
Oh, Sire! this fatal error shun, nor choose
A course which all your merit tarnishes!"

The game in which Sixtus had engaged was one of selfish ambition and nepotism, and he played it boldly, unmoved by this appeal, or by the straits to which he was reduced by his lawless barons. In the words of the same old chronicler,—

"Hapless was then the holy Father's case,
Each house in Rome a garrison, each street
Alive with armed escorts; e'en by day
Rapine was rife as in the lonely wood,
And unredressed, while cardinals
Were seized in full consistory; for now
Colonna's and Savelli's bands were up;
The Pontiff's power at discount."

Under a robust frame Federigo concealed the taint of a vitiated constitution, and though but entering upon the autumn of life, long exposure and fatigue, aggravated by repeated severe accidents, had anticipated the effects of age. Yet he rallied from the first attack of malaria, at all times dangerous to one of his years, and, had he yielded to the persuasions of friends and confederates by retiring to Bologna during the unhealthy season, his valuable life might have been spared. He owned the justice of their apprehensions, but, deeming his personal danger in remaining to be fully counterbalanced by the probable loss of Ferrara, which, at that juncture, he considered the key-stone of Italian policy, should he quit the army, he rejected the reiterated representations of his family and adherents, refusing on any consideration to relinquish the post of honour and duty. But, whilst he spared not himself, he ever and anon renewed to the allied powers his remonstrances against their folly in thus pitting a brave army against a noxious climate. As his saddest trial was to see fresh levies of his attached subjects prostrated by sickness on arriving from the healthful breezes of their native uplands, he sent away his son Antonio, with all whom he could spare, reserving in the camp at La Stellata but 400 of his immediate followers, whom the foggy atmosphere and putrid water soon thinned away to forty.

Anderson

FEDERIGO DI MONTEFELTRO

After the picture by Justus van Ghent, once in the Ducal Collection at Urbino, now in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome