Francesco Rucellai, a cousin of Giovanni Battista, from whom the present branch of the family descends, began life as a page to the Grand Duke Ferdinando II., and was Vicario of the Upper Val d’Arno in 1658. A man of considerable culture, and gifted with charming manners, he was made a member of all the learned academies of Florence, and wrote a history of his native town in nine large volumes and one of his own family, from which I have quoted. His grandson Giulio studied law at Pisa in 1736, and became a Senator and legal adviser to the Grand Duke Giovan Gastone, last of the Medici. Enlightened, patriotic and liberal, he determined to curb the power of the clergy and to abolish the Inquisition. Several times the Pope demanded the dismissal of so obnoxious a minister, and when Francis I. of Lorraine became the ruler of Tuscany he renewed his request. But Rucellai was too necessary a man. He steadily withstood the pretensions of Clement XII. to nominate bishops, a right that had been exercised by the Grand Dukes for two hundred years; and at length, after the well-known case of the poet Tommaso Crudeli, the last inmate of the prisons of the Inquisition in Tuscany, he succeeded in suppressing the tribunal. Soon afterwards he framed a law obliging the clergy to contribute their quota to the general taxation, and on the 2nd March, 1769, by his advice, the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo proclaimed the celebrated law against mortmain. Ten years later the right of asylum, that fertile source of scandal and incentive to crime, was done away with, the jurisdiction of the bishops was limited to purely spiritual matters and, in order to protect young girls from being forced to enter a convent against their will, no woman under thirty was allowed to take the vows. The large sums arising from the sale of suppressed convents Rucellai used in founding schools for poor girls. He adopted his orphan nephew Giovanni Pietro, who became a member of various Florentine academies, was an admirable musician, and painted well in _tempera_. Count Cosimo Rucellai has a curious collection of small family portraits which were probably copied by Giovanni from old frescoes and pictures which no longer exist. PALAZZO SALVIATI (NOW A SCHOOL OF THE SCOLOPI FRIARS) _Via del Corso. No. 4._