These unquestionable facts are met by an allegation that the fountains of princely patronage were so tainted, their streams so generally corrupt, as to blight the fruits which they seemed to foster, and that their influence thus from a blessing became a curse. Let us examine a little the grounds for this assertion, for surely it is not by such sweeping and prejudiced denunciations that we shall arrive at truth. As to the ornamental arts, there cannot be a doubt that these received, throughout Italy, from governments of every form, as well as from numberless corporations and individuals, a hearty encouragement which might well shame our degenerate age. Yet the ducal palace at Urbino, the Palazzo del T at Mantua, the tombs of the Scaligers, and the medallions of Malatesta, yield the palm to no republican works of the same class. It was by Cosimo and Lorenzo de' Medici, and by Duke Federigo di Montefeltro, that the undeveloped energies of new-born science, and the long neglected classics of Greece and Rome were nursed and tended through their years of infancy, which storms of faction, in most of the free states, condemned to neglect. The enlightened liberality of these princes, and of Malatesta Novello, founded libraries for the preservation of works composed under their own beneficent encouragement, as well as of manuscripts collected by them from all quarters at immense cost, and this when no republic but Venice aspired to such literary distinctions. Nor were the troubled waters of democratic strife safe for the poet's gay bark and light canvas. Even Dante, though made of sternest stuff, sought shelter in a courtly harbour from the hurricanes of Florentine faction. It is true that, in many compositions of minstrels trained in princely halls, the themes are ephemeral and the epithets overstrained, savouring, to a purer taste and more severe idiom, of unworthy subserviency; nor is the other polite literature, emanating from the same atmosphere, exempt from similar blemishes. But allowance must be made for the seducing fecundity of the language in superlatives, more redolent of dulcet sounds than of definite signification, a quality which has ever tempted Italian mediocrity to assume the borrowed plumes of poesy, and to conceal its native barrenness under magniloquent but flimsy common-places. The well earned gratitude of authors is fittingly paid in compliments, eulogies, or dedications, and as such coin is at the unlimited command of the debtor, and useful only to the receiver, its over-issue is fairly excusable. This results from principles inherent in human nature, and it matters little whether the obligations have been incurred from sovereigns or from subjects, under an autocrat or a democracy. Even among ourselves, in times when talent had more to hope from private patronage than from extended popularity, a similar currency was scarcely less in vogue, and it was only the poverty of our idiom that kept its circulation within bounds.