It was December 6, 1517, and high festival was to be held for the marriage of the King of Poland with Donna Bona Sforza. The guests comprised the whole nobility of Naples; and worthy Passeri begins his account with an accurate Morning-Post-like statement of the costume of each in the order of their arrival at the church. Doubtless the eager weaver, a shrewd judge of such matters, had pushed himself into a good place in the front row of the crowd, who lined the roadway of the noble guests, and might have been seen with tablets in hand, taking notes with busy excitement to be transferred to his journal at night. One after another the high-sounding titles, very many of them Spanish, are set forth, as they swept by, brilliant with gold and every brightest tint of costly fabric, and are swallowed up by the dark nave of the huge church. It is not necessary to attempt a translation of all the changes Master Passeri rings on velvet, satin, gold, brocade, and costly furs. Merely noting that the bride's dress is estimated to be worth seven thousand ducats, we let them all pass on till "The illustrious lady the Signora Vittoria, Marchioness of Pescara," arrives. She is mounted on a black and white jennet, with housings of crimson velvet, fringed with gold. She is accompanied by six ladies in waiting, uniformly clad in azure damask, and attended by six grooms on foot, with cloaks and jerkins of blue and yellow satin. The lady herself wears a robe of brocaded crimson velvet, with large branches of beaten gold on it. She has a crimson satin cap, with a head-dress of wrought gold above it; and around her waist is a girdle of beaten gold. Some of the assembled company, one might think, would require their girdles to be of some more yielding material. For, on quitting the church, they sat down to table at six in the evening, "and began to eat," says Passeri, "and left off at five in the morning!" The order and materials of this more than Homeric feast, are handed down to posterity with scrupulous accuracy by our chronicler. But the stupendous menu, in its entirety, would be almost as intolerable to the reader, as having to sit out the eleven hours orgy in person. A few particulars culled here and there, partly because they are curious, and partly because the meaning of the words is more intelligible than is the case in many instances, even to a Neapolitan of the present day, will amply suffice. [Sidenote: A FESTIVAL.]