In an age when omens were observed with a heathenish superstition, the people began to take note of these before they considered the recent event in its practical and political bearings. It was now recollected that the journey of the Prince and Princess, on their return from their marriage, had been interrupted, before they reached Pesaro, by an extraordinary tempest, which flooded their capital, and delayed their public entry. On the day month preceding Federigo's death, a flight of brown moths passed over Urbino towards the sea, darkening the air for hours. Again, during the fatal night, a strange and threatening cloud was seen by many to cast its gloomy shadow over that city, and, after successively assuming the forms of the eagle of Montefeltro, and the tree of Rovere, to disperse and vanish in the direction of Rome. Others saw serpents and similar monstrous apparitions wrestling in mid-air, and contributed their quota to the strange saws and marvellous instances which fed the popular craving for prodigies. It is scarcely necessary to observe that these facts, or at all events their application, had called for no remark until men's minds were filled with the catastrophe of which they were then interpreted as the precursors. But it may be thought singular that those who busied themselves in finding out ominous coincidences omitted to note a circumstance chronicled by the often-cited Diary, that, on the 21st of August, 1604, nine months before the Prince's birth, lightning struck the Duke's chamber at Castel Durante. Thunder on the left was hailed by the Roman augurs as lucky, but this visitation seems too violent for a good omen. * * * * * The honours of a royal sepulture were lavished on one whose life had been thus unworthy of his station; and such was the magnificence displayed in the trappings of death that, besides many overcharged narratives of the funeral, portraits were multiplied of the Prince laid out in his richly-silvered robes. He was deposited in a tomb which Francesco Maria had destined for himself in the grotto or crypt of the metropolitan cathedral, with an inscription to the following purport:-- In this tomb, Prepared for himself by Francesco Maria II., Last Duke of Urbino, Rest the ashes of His son Federigo, Who was cut off by a sudden death, On the 29th June, MDCXXIII., Aged XVIII. years. On a tablet in the church of Sta. Chiara, his fate is thus touchingly commemorated:--"The waning day saw Federigo Prince of Urbino, in whom sank the house della Rovere, sound in health, and pre-eminent in every gift of fortune; the succeeding dawn beheld him struck down by sudden death, on the 29th of June, 1623. Stranger! pass on, and learn that happiness, like the brittle glass, just when brightest is most fragile."[109] [Footnote 109: See these and other monumental inscriptions of Urbino sovereigns, Appendix, No. VII.] * * * * *