’In a week the Duke sets out. In the meantime, like an ambassador that must suffer present festival for the sake of future credit, I sit at feasts and plays; or, perchance, rise to denounce the latter for no better than whores’ saturnalia. (O my father! to see fair ladies, the Duchess herself, smile on such shameless bawdry!) Whereon the Duke thunders all to stop, with threats of fury on the actors to mend their ways, making the poor fools gasp bewildered. For how had _they_ presumed upon custom? Bad habit is like the moth in fur, so easily shaken out when first detected; so hardly when established. Once, more to my liking, we have a mummers’ dance, with clowns in rams’ heads butting; and again a harvest ballet, with all the seasons pictured very pretty. Another day comes a Mantuan who plays on three lutes at once, more curious than tuneful; and after him one who walks on a rope in the court, a steel cuirass about his body. Now happens their festival of the _Bacchidæ_, a pagan survival, but certes sweet and graceful, with its songs and vines and dances. Maybe for my sake they purge it of some licence. Well, Heaven witness to them what loss or gain thereby to beauty. ’Often the court goes hunting the wolf or deer—I care not; or a-picnicking by the river, which I like, and where we catch trouts and lampreys to cook and eat on the green; then run we races, perchance, or play at ball. So merry and light-hearted—how can wickedness be other than an accident with these children of good-nature? To mark the jokes they play on one another—mischievous sometimes—suggests to one a romping nursery, which yet I know not. Father, who was my mother? I trow we romped somewhere in heaven. Once some gallants of them, being in collusion with the watch, enter, in the guise of robbers, Messer Secretary Simonetta’s house at midnight, and bind and blindfold that great man, and placing him on an ass in his night-gear (which is an excuse for nothing), carry him through the streets as if to their quarters. Which, having gained, they unbind; and lo! he is in the inner ward of the castello, the Duke and a great company about him and shouts of laughter; in which I could not help but join, though it was shameful. Next day the Duchess herself does not disdain a wrestling match with the lady Catherine, her adoptive daughter; when the lithe little serpent, enwreathing that stately Queen, doth pull her sitting on her lap, whereby she conquers. For all improvising and stories they have as great a passion as ingenuity; and therein, my gifts by Christ’s ensample lying, comes my opportunity. Dear Father, am I presumptuous in my feeble might, like the boy Phæton when he coaxed the Sun’s reins from Ph[oe]bus, and scorched the wry road since called the Milky Way? That is such an old tale as we tell by moonlight under trees—such as Christ Himself, the child-God, hath recounted to us, sitting shoulder-deep in meadow-grass, or by the pretty falling streams.