Such spectacles as this triumph and this imprisonment, which the boy of twenty-one now beheld, were to be familiar to him all his life. The king-like pope Alexander VI. and his son Cæsar Borgia, the warrior Julius II., the Medici Leo X., the soon-dead Adrian VI., and the irresolute Clement VII., successively ruled in Rome, or rather dwelt in Rome, the Cloaca Maxima of Italy, whose pollution sapped the strength of all the land. The sack of Rome in 1527 was among the last of the long series of Italian woes Castiglione witnessed. He was not in Italy at that moment. The last five years of his life were spent at Madrid as papal nuncio at the court of Charles V. He went thither on the eve of the battle of Pavia, and the imprisonment there of Francis I. soon followed; an imprisonment that seems a terrible echo of that of the enemy of France a quarter of a century before. 'Il Cortegiano' was written in the intervals of military and diplomatic services, rendered first to Guidobaldo of Urbino and later to Frederic of Mantua, the son of Francesco. The book was begun probably about 1514; it received the last touches in 1524, but it was not published until 1528. The dialogues that compose the book are feigned to have occurred in the winter of 1506-7. At that time the author was in England, an envoy from the Duke of Urbino to Henry VII., sent as the Duke's proxy to be installed as Companion of the Garter. He carried with him splendid gifts for the King, fine falcons, beautiful horses, and a picture by Raffael--St. George and the Dragon, in which St. George wears "the Garter." Castiglione's public labors had made him well known, when between him and his high-born friends there was talk of his marriage with a daughter of the house of Medici; but political influences caused her to be given by preference to a Strozzi. Had this alliance been formed, Castiglione would have found himself, in later years, the nephew of two popes and the uncle of a queen of France. But better luck was in keeping for him. In 1516 he had the singular good fortune to make a marriage of tender affection; but his wife died only four years later: from that time his chief pleasure was in the society of his friends. They numbered all the most distinguished Italians of his day; men whose intellectual powers found artistic expression alike in words, or the painter's canvas, or the sculptor's marble, or the architect's stone: and it is the reflection of this wide and varied companionship that gives charm and also weight to the pages of 'Il Cortegiano.' A more delicate delightfulness comes from the tone of liberal refinement with which the impression is conveyed of singularly ennobling intercourse with women.