His conscience was not at peace. ‘In the arrangement and administration of affairs of the city,’ says the honest Vespasiano, with the straightforward naïveté and conscientiousness which he never lays aside, even when speaking of a man for whom he has great respect and admiration, ‘it could not fail that his conscience was loaded with many things, as is usually the case with those who govern states and rule others. He perceived that if he wished to preserve himself in his position and obtain the mercy of God, works of piety were necessary. As it now appeared to him that a part of his possessions, I know not how, had been obtained in a doubtful manner, he wished to roll off this burden from his shoulders, and poured out his heart to Pope Eugenius IV., who was then in Florence, begging him to tell him how he could lighten his conscience.’ The building of churches and convents was a principal means of paying this debt, according to the ideas of the time; Duke Gian Galeazzo, not to mention a thousand others, built the cathedral of Milan and the Certosa of Pavia, and the citizen of Florence, whatever his sins may have been, was certainly no Visconti. But he built, in spite of dukes and kings, in Florence and out of it. It was his special passion, and he understood this art. He had always architects around him; Michelozzi accompanied him into his exile, and Brunellesco was among his intimate friends. He executed great works in the city, not to mention his magnificent house, which must have been completed in 1440. We have already spoken of many of these works, and they will be treated of more in detail subsequently; here they may be enumerated in succession. San Lorenzo and San Marco are for the greater part due to him. The Vallombrosan cloister of Sta. Verdiana, founded at the end of the fourteenth century by Ser Niccolò di Buonagiunta, was restored by him. In the cloister of Sta. Croce, he built the novitiate, with the adjoining chapel and choir. He enriched with altars and adornments many churches. The Canonica of San Lorenzo is said to have cost him 40,000 gold florins, that of San Marco 70,000, and the palace 60,000. At the foot of the hill of Fiesole he built a church and abbey for the canons of the Augustinians, whom Pope Eugenius IV. transplanted thither in 1439; and higher up, not far from the little town, the church of San Girolamo, on the site where the congregation of the Jeromites was founded, about the end of the last century, by Carlo, of the family of the Counts Guidi, where the villa Ricasoli is now to be seen. The villa at Careggi, in the most beautiful situation, scarcely two miles from the city, and the favourite residence of himself and his sons, received its present form from him, as well as the villa now named after the Mozzi, on the Fiesolan hill, and that of Cafaggiuolo, in the thickly-wooded country on the slope of the Apennines, on the road leading to Bologna. He built a Franciscan convent in the midst