But enough of this gossip: the reader of the _Cortegiano_, and its author's charming letters, will find there many more attractive and not less veracious touches of the Montefeltrian court, where learning and accomplishment were often called upon to give dignity and grace to social pastimes. Thus, the Duchess is represented as singing to her lute those verses from the fourth _Æneid_, in which, at the moment of self-immolation, Dido apostrophised the garments forgotten by her faithless lover when he fled from her charms, until, Orpheus-like, she had wiled the savage animals from their lairs, and set the stones in sympathetic movement. At her court there were no lack of pens to clothe in verse the passing fancies of the hour, and adapt them to the musical or melodramatic tastes which gave a tone of refinement to its amusements. Thus, for the carnival of 1506, Castiglione and his messmate Cesare Gonzaga composed the pastoral eclogue of _Tirsis_, which was acted by them before the court, with choruses and a brilliant moresque dance. The personages of the dialogue are Iola (Castiglione) and Dameta (Gonzaga), who describe to Tirsi, a stranger shepherd, the ducal circle of Urbino, with the Duchess at its head as goddess of the river Metauro. The Moresca, so named from its supposed Moorish origin, was perhaps borrowed from the ancient Pyrrhic dance, and consisted in a sort of mock fight, performed to the sound of music with measured tread, and blunted poignards. Next spring a somewhat similar pastoral, from the pen of Bembo, was recited by him and Ottaviano Fregoso to the same audience. Such and such-like were the favourite court diversions of Urbino. Their stately conceits and solemn pedantry suited the spirit of that classic age and the genius of a pomp-loving people; but it would be scarcely fair to regard them as fully embodying the tone of manners prevalent in the palace of Guidobaldo. In it were harmoniously mingled the opposite qualities which then predominated at the various Italian courts. Scholastic pretensions, still esteemed in many of them, here thawed before the easier address of the new school. Those abstruse studies which the Medici had brought into vogue were eclipsed by a galaxy of brilliant wits. Even the ruthless bearing of the old condottieri princes mellowed under the charm of female tact, while the sensual splendour indulged by recent pontiffs was chastened by the exemplary demeanour of the ducal pair.