Francesco, his eider brother, assuredly did not fail in achieving respectability from any too great openness or sincerity of character. For a more dissembling nature has rarely perhaps existed. His hypocrisy frequently exhibited itself in traits of so strangely profound a kind, as to have the appearance of a hope to deceive either himself or his Creator. For he would practise them upon his own confederates in crime. Nor was ever any one less indifferent to the estimate his fellows might form of him. The honour of the Medicean name, as he understood the meaning of that phrase, was very dear to him. Yet he made himself the common fable of the courts of Italy. He contrived to earn the contempt of every crowned head in Europe; and was constantly giving rise to that "scandal" which is a respectable Italian's greatest horror. Strong passions, and an obstinate will exaggerated by the possession of absolute power into something at times very like partial insanity, joined to great weakness of all the higher intellectual faculties, and a profound ignorance of the nature, beauty, and value of real worth and nobleness, led him into all this mischief, and were a source of never–ending sorrow and trouble to the Cardinal. [Sidenote: PIETRO DE' MEDICI.] Pietro, the younger brother, was almost an equal thorn in his prudent and respectably ambitious brother's side. His was a nature as unlike as possible to that of either the Duke or the Cardinal; and was not without some indications, that under better circumstances, it might have contained in it the elements of a finer character than either of theirs. As it was, Pietro was an unmitigated and avowed scamp; the centre and leader of all the most profligate young men in the city; the terror of quiet citizens, the insulter of the impotent laws which he braved, the despair of the Cardinal as a disgrace to the family, and the dread of the Duke from his constant and insatiable demands for money.[156]