The accounts we have of the proceedings against the Duke of Urbino upon this charge are somewhat contradictory. Baldi says that his impetuous temper, ill-brooking the severity of one whom he was conscious of having honestly served, tempted him to throw off his uncle and seek an engagement under Louis; and the monitory issued against him by Leo X. in 1516 charges him with employing Count Castiglione on such a mission: but this foolish idea quickly passing, he obeyed the citation. On his arrival, attended by Castiglione, he was put under arrest, and obliged to give bail in 100,000 scudi to await the sentence of a commission of enquiry, consisting of six cardinals, one of whom was Giovanni de' Medici, afterwards Leo X. The process was long and complicated, for the Duke had many proofs, oral and documentary, to adduce of the Legate's secret intelligence with the French and the Bentivoglii. The pleading in his defence, by Filippo Beroaldo the younger, has already been referred to as in the Vatican library, and is a very remarkable declamation. Instead of urging the hot blood of one-and-twenty in extenuation of a sudden outbreak of fury under strong provocation, it justifies the assassination as merited by the Cardinal's notorious and nefarious treasons. Representing his life and morals in the darkest colours, it brands his boyhood as base; his puberty as passed in flagitious intercourse with bawds and gamblers; his youth as debauched by bribery, peculation and sacrilege; his mature age as degraded by the sacrifice of friends, the plunder of provinces, the open sale of sacred offices. It charges him with having had the throats cut of four eminent citizens of Bologna, against whom no accusation was brought, and leaving their bodies in the piazza; and further alleges that, having heard of the beautiful daughter-in-law of one of these victims, he sent for her to his presence, when his attendants, alarmed by fearful cries, broke open the doors and discovered him in the act of violating her person. After narrating his manifold treacheries towards the Pontiff and the Duke, the advocate, far from palliating the homicide, boasts of it as a public service, and, declaring that Francesco Maria was an instrument in the Almighty's hand for the great and benevolent purpose of ridding mankind of such a monster, only laments, for the public weal, that the holy inspiration which dictated it had not been sooner vouchsafed to this "liberator of the commonwealth." Lowering his tone, however, towards the close of this inflated oration, he appeals to the judges to spare a hero whose promise of future usefulness was precious to Italy, and in whose acquittal many princely personages were interested. The fierce philippic of Beroaldo was reproduced under a poetic garb in the satirical ode of Giovio, which Roscoe has printed. Neither authority can be deemed unprejudiced, but public feeling seems to have confirmed these invectives, and even Guicciardini attempts not