Among many interesting publications upon Italy which have recently issued from the English press, is that of Signor Mariotti.[3] With a command of our language rarely attained by foreigners, he has clothed a vast mass of information in an exuberant style, savouring of the sweet South. As an episode to his sketch of Tasso, he dedicates to the two dynasties who ruled in Urbino a single page, in which there occur seven misstatements. John or Giovanni della Rovere was never sovereign of Camerino; his cousin, Girolamo Riario, held no ecclesiastical dignity; the "unrivalled splendour" of the Montefeltrian reign at Urbino did not extend over even one century; the wife of Giovanni della Rovere was neither daughter nor heiress of Guidobaldo I. of Urbino, nor had she any "just claim to his throne"; Duke Francesco Maria did not remove either his library or treasures of art to Mantua. These slips, by a writer generally painstaking and correct, surely indicate some deficiency in the accessible sources of information regarding a principality which has for centuries been proverbial, in the words of Tasso, as "the stay and refuge of gifted men." [Footnote 3: I speak of the first edition of his _Italy_; the reprint of 1848 is enlarged but not improved.] The truth is, that although the Dukes of Urbino figure everywhere as friends of learning and patrons of art, no work has yet appeared establishing their especial claim to such distinction, in a land where courts abounded and dilettanteship was a fashion. That of Riposati has indeed given us the series of these sovereigns, but his biographical sketches are meagre, and chiefly illustrative of their coinage. The lives of Dukes Federigo and Francesco Maria I., by Muzio and Leoni, are excessively rare; Baldi's crude biographies are either recently and obscurely published, or remain in manuscript. Out of Italy these authors are scarcely known. This paucity of illustration is not, however, the only cause why these princes have continued in unmerited obscurity. Whilst endeavouring to guard himself against undue hero-worship, and to subject the policy and character of those sovereigns to the tests within his reach, the author has been obliged in some instances to assume the functions of an advocate, and to defend them from charges unjustly or inadvisedly brought. This will be especially found in the life of Duke Francesco Maria I., who, as the victim of Leo X., and the opponent of Florence, has met with scanty justice from the three standard historians of that age in Italy, France, and England. The patriotism of Guicciardini, as a Florentine, was inherently provincial; as a partisan of the Medici, he had no sympathies with a prince whom they hated with the loathing of ingratitude; as an annalist he never forgot the day when he had cowered before the lofty spirit at the council-board. All that he has written of Francesco Maria is therefore tinged with gall, and his