Were we to estimate the celebrities of Urbino by the encomiums of their partial countrymen, and measure their claims upon mundane immortality by the standard set up by Baldi Lazzari, Grossi, Cimarelli, and Olivieri, it would become our indispensable duty to add at least a volume to the present work. But these authors were deeply imbued with that peculiarly Italian patriotism which, narrowing its sympathies within the limits of a township or a petty state, enshrined provincial mediocrity in a temple of fame modelled upon a scale of national splendour. Believing that the dignity of their little fatherland depended upon the notices of its existence which they could worm out of antique memorials, however doubtful in authority, and upon the number of notable names they could connect with its localities, they tasked themselves to this investigation with industry worthy of a nobler and more useful object. Many folio volumes, ponderous in their contents as in their material, were the result; but they preserve only laborious trifling, a harvest of wordy conclusions gleaned from a soil barren of tangible facts, dissertations which may be summed up in the axiom _ex nihilo nihil fit_, "nothing comes of nought." Like those of the northern senachies, their themes were often legendary or invented, and it would have been scarcely a loss to literature had these productions been equally fugitive. Should the worthies mentioned in the following chapters seem scarcely to maintain the literary renown of Urbino, our readers ought in justice to remember that scarcely a tithe has found place in our pages of those whom zealous eulogists have placed upon the roll of Italian literati, but "Whose obscurer name No proud historian's page will chronicle." CHAPTER XXIV Count Guidantonio a patron of learned men--Duke Federigo--The _Assorditi_ Academy--Dedications to him--Prose writers of Urbino--Gentile Becci, Bishop of Arezzo--Francesco Venturini--Berni of Gubbio--Polydoro di Vergilio--Vespasiano Filippi--Castiglione--Bembo--Learned ladies. The reputation long enjoyed by the house of Montefeltro as patrons of letters and arts can scarcely be traced further back than Federigo, second Duke of Urbino. Yet the few memorials that remain of his father, Count Guidantonio, throw some scattered lights upon congenial tastes, and from these we select three letters to the magistracy of Siena, which are preserved in the Archivio Diplomatico of that city. The first of them is written in Latin, the others in Italian. "To the mighty and potent Lords the well beloved Fathers, the Lords Priors, Governors, and Captain of the people of the city of Siena. "Mighty and potent Lords, my especial Fathers,