was, and still continues, so embanked that its waters may easily be let loose upon the hapless cultivators, submerging their dwellings and swamping their crops. Numerous streams, navigable by boats, laid it open to privateering incursions, highly attractive to amphibious Venetian adventurers. Finally, the malaria, always generated by summer heats, was naturally more inveterate when invaders had opened the sluices and broken the banks, thereby flooding an unusual extent of marsh-land. Thus ravaged by fire and sword, and decimated by disease, the unhappy natives had good cause to curse the ambition of which they were victims. In no part of Italy had the people been so exempt from the calamities of war. The family of Este, ever addicted to habits of almost effeminate indulgence, had been long represented by Duke Borso, whose reign, as described in the Ferrarese _Diary_, was one continued revel at home and pageant abroad. Those who would understand the extent to which prodigal magnificence and immoderate festivity were carried in the Peninsula, will there find details of refined luxury and lavish expenditure, scarcely credible in an age but emerging from what we are accustomed to regard as barbarism, or in a state enjoying no extraordinary resources. The plan of the campaign was to reduce Ferrara by a combined attack, in which a flotilla of five hundred vessels of light draught, fitted out at Ancona and Venice, was to ascend the Po, and co-operate with the troops of Sanseverino. War was proclaimed on the 3rd of May, but the Venetian general had already opened his operations by invading the Polesine, a fenny dependency of the d'Este family extending between the Adige and the Po. Marching his army southward from Legnano, he crossed the Veronese marshes upon a hastily constructed roadway of beams, supported by flat boats and faggots, and attacked Mellara on the north bank of the Po. Having taken it in three days, he advanced eastward to Castelnuovo, which capitulated after a ten days' siege. Following the river's course, he reached Ficheruolo on the 11th of May, and immediately invested it. This place being scarcely more than twelve miles from Ferrara, already menaced by the armament on the lower reaches of the river, the Duke of Urbino advanced to meet the enemy, and posted himself at La Stellata, which lay opposite Ficheruolo and commanded the passes of the Po. His opinion of the state of matters may best be gathered from a despatch addressed by him about this time to Lorenzo de' Medici, and printed by Fabronio from the Florentine archives. "Magnificent and dearest Brother,