The Turks were in possession of Otranto. The Turkish raids were the constant terror and bugbear of Italy in these centuries, as were those of the Danes to our own island at an earlier period. Like the Danish inroads too to our monarchs, the aggressions of the Turks were sometimes a motive, and constantly a pretext to the popes for raising troops and money, and requiring the assistance of the other states of Italy. The Venetians had in the year before granted no such aid to Sixtus against the infidels. To obtain the promise of such now from the Signory was the avowed motive of the Count's visit. But no Italian potentate ever believed anything that was avowed. Besides, whenever the Pope was bent on hiding the real causes of movements, whose true scope was some iniquitous spoliation or ambitious scheme, he always had the Turks in his mouth. [Sidenote: FELONS IN ERMINE.] Now for the real motive. Hercules, Duke of Ferrara, had quarrelled with the Venetians. He was also in disgrace with Sixtus. In the war, which had ensued between the Pope and Florence, in consequence of the Pazzi affair, and the hanging of the Archbishop of Pisa, Duke Hercules had accepted the place of General on the Florentine side. For which highly irreligious conduct Heaven's vicar had excommunicated him, and declared him deprived of his dukedom. Hercules of Ferrara however declared, that excommunicated he might be, but that Duke of Ferrara he would live and die by the grace of his own right arm. The business in hand therefore between Sixtus and the Republic was first to unite their force for the destruction of this audacious rebel, and then to decide who was to have the spoil. The Republic said they would have Ferrara;—and meant it. The Pope said that it should belong to the Church; but meant, that it should fall to the lot of Girolamo, and form the main pillar of that edifice of family greatness, for which Sixtus lived and laboured. But in stating the high policy of princes with this naked brutality,—into which the necessity of brevity has betrayed the writer—there is a danger, that perverse and ill-constituted idiosyncrasies may picture to themselves Counts, high and mighty Signors, and even Heaven's Vicegerent himself under the figure and similitude of some Bill Sikes, Artful Dodger, and reverend Fagin contending with mutually deceptive intentions respecting some equally nobly won booty. It becomes the historian therefore to lose no time in having recourse to those means, which the time-honoured practice and general consent of the world have appointed for the decorous draping and nobilitating similar passages of history. Bill Sikes in Doge's bonnet and ermine cloak, a venerable Fagin duly tiara-ed and apostolically elected, and an Artful Dodger in knightly guise, with a lovely and brilliant she-dodger by his side, gracefully going through decorous festivities in ducal halls in the midst of admiring satellites, will offend no proprieties.