brilliant men of his time and had heard talk that embraced all that was then known or surmised of art and learning. For Constantinople had fallen to the Turk only a generation before that time, and what had survived of Greek culture, fleeing across the seas to Italy, had found its chief shelter and patronage in the household of the great Medici. While in Florence, young Farnese must have heard Savonarola preach; but no trace of the great Dominican’s influence is to be found throughout his long life. The classic spirit enthralled his intellect, and the splendor of the Medici prince captured his imagination. In later years his careful Latinity, his splendid and liberal manner, and his gay and witty conversation, together with his patronage of artists and his passion for the antique, proved how profoundly he had been influenced by the experiences of his early youth. Placed thus in the very heart of a movement which freed the individual from all limitations save those of his own personality and opened the world before him, he early made up his mind to become Pope and to raise his own family, as the Medici had done, to the rank of princes. The ambition was perhaps common, but the ability with which he pursued these aims for upward of sixty years was not common, and their complete achievement was little short of the marvellous. It took him forty years to reach St. Peter’s chair, and he occupied it only fifteen; but before he died one of his grandsons had married a daughter of Charles V, the Emperor of Austria; another was betrothed to the daughter of the King of France; and two more were cardinals and multimillionaires. Later on, his descendants married into the royal houses of Portugal and Spain, and the Farnese family passed out of existence only by being merged by marriage into the royal house of the Neapolitan Bourbons. One grandson, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese II, was the chief art patron of his time, and this in an age when there were many such men; and one great-grandson was that Duke of Parma whose fame as a great captain is written in what were, until the second decade of the twentieth century, the bloodiest annals of the Netherlands. To provide a suitable setting for this princely family, the Pope, some five years before his death, began this Farnese Palace. Antonio da San Gallo, the younger, Giacomo della Porta, and Michelangelo designed its façades and cornice. The great structure was completed long after the Pope’s death by Alessandro Farnese II. It was recognized at once to be the most sumptuous of the Roman palaces. It stands upon the site of the old Palazzo Ferriz, which was at one time the residence of the Spanish ambassador, and had passed into the possession of the Augustine monks of the Piazza del Popolo. The old Ferriz Palace had been on the Tiber bank, for it was not until Julius II’s time that the _Strada_, or Via Giulia, was cut through, thus separating the palace from the river. Where these fountains now stand