All Milan was witness to the festal doings on this notable meeting,—the processioning, revelling, tailoring, gilding, and reckless profusion, which marked the noble rivalry between these two great men. This friendly emulation was pushed to an intensity, which seems unhappily to have led the lay champion in the generous contest to have recourse to disloyal arms against his rival. For a tell-tale gossip of the pestilent race of scribblers has recorded that the great Galeazzo purchased secretly a quantity of imitation gems, and passed them off for real;[59] an anecdote extremely creditable to the fifteenth century artificers in that line. In all the ordinary pastimes and pleasures of the princes of that day, of whatever sort, the splendid Cardinal, though so recently a mendicant friar, was able and willing to run neck and neck with his secular host. But some of Maria Galeazzo's favourite enjoyments were not ordinary. He was ever an avid eye-witness of the executions, tortures, and mutilations, which his duty as a sovereign obliged him frequently to inflict on his subjects. We have indeed on record a sufficient number of instances of princes who had this taste, to justify our deeming it part of a despotic ruler's natural idiosyncrasy. But Galeazzo had stranger, if less maleficent, propensities. He revelled in the sight of death, and human decay. Some strange touch of that insanity, which so frequently, and with such salutary warning, develops itself in minds exposed to the poison that wells out from the possession of unchecked power, influenced, as in such cases it is apt to do, his moral rather than his intellectual nature. He would cause himself to be brought into the presence of the suffering, the dying, and the dead, for the mere pleasure of witnessing pain and destruction. He would rifle graves to gaze on the process of corruption, and haunted charnel-houses, impelled by the instinct of the ghoul, rather than by any touch of that sentiment, which impels the morbid fanatic to seek in such contemplatio a moving sermon on the vanity of human wishes. This man, whose wishes, hopes, and ambitions were as unbridled in their violence as low and vain in their aims and scope, would hurry from the death-chamber to the revel, and from the charnel-house hasten to plot long-sighted intrigues in the council-hall.