he curtailed my cares, relieved my sighs, appeased my fears, cleared my entanglements. One only consideration soothes and mitigates my mental affliction, and the grief that envenoms my heart, that since fate has bereaved me of such a parent, it may find for me another in you, magnificent fathers, whom I heartily beseech to assume a paternal care of me your child, and of my state, and to counsel me in my affairs as a steady son, who will in no way abandon these recollections, and my paternal associations. Prepared for all compliance with your wishes, your magnificences' son, "GUIDO COUNT OF MONTEFELTRO AND URBINO. "Urbino, 9th May, 1404." Count Antonio died in April, 1404, and by his wife, a daughter of Ugolino Gonzaga, left, 1. COUNT GUIDANTONIO, his successor. 2. ANNA, who died unmarried in 1434.[*34] 3. BATTISTA. [Footnote *34: Anna married Francesco Brancaleoni. Cf. UGOLINI, _op. cit._, I., 191. Later she is said to have married a Malatesta.] Upon the last of these sisters we must dwell in some detail, for she was conspicuous among the ladies of high birth, whose acquirements gave illustration to her age. By contemporary authors, her talents and endowments are spoken of in most flattering terms, whilst her character is celebrated for piety and justice, benignity and clemency. She corresponded with many of these writers, and employed her pen in theology and poetry. Among other moral treatises, she is said to have written upon human frailty, and on the true faith. In such exercises she found a resource amid the large share of public and domestic calamities which shadowed her lot. Her marriage was celebrated in 1404, when about twenty-one years of age, with Galeazzo Malatesta, heir of the seigneury of Pesaro, a spiritless creature entirely devoid of the martial qualities of his race, and whose incapacity so disgusted his subjects that, after two years, he was driven out. He subsequently sold his birthright by a transaction which we shall describe in our fifth chapter, and, forsaking his wife, consoled himself in old age with another mate. Battista, with her only child, fled from her rebellious subjects to Urbino, and at the court of her brother found a ready welcome. When the Emperor Sigismund arrived there, on returning from his coronation at Rome in 1433, she was selected to pronounce, in his honour, a Latin harangue, which is published, but now possesses little interest. Her poetic vein had been encouraged by her father-in-law, who, anticipating the literary tastes which prevailed among the Italian princes later in this century, gained the surname of _Malatesta degli Sonetti_, from his success in that class of compositions. Several of the Italian sonnets and canzoni which passed between them are preserved in manuscript, as well as some of her letters in Latin.[35] Specimens of both are printed in the Appendix No. I., including a letter of Battista written for an