"Several years elapsed after my father's escape, without bringing us any intelligence of his fate. This mysterious silence was a source of intense anxiety. Florence was hateful to me, and my impatience to rejoin my beloved parent became at length too vehement to be controlled any longer by the remonstrances of my aunt. I keenly felt all the injustice exercised by the tyrannous and reckless Cosmo against my family, and my departure was accelerated by the intimation from a friend at court that my proceedings were watched by the secret agents of the usurper, and that any unguarded expression of political discontent, would be the signal of my incarceration, and, too probably, of banishment or death. I quitted Florence unobserved, changed my name, and proceeded to Venice, intending, while I pursued my inquiries after my father, to study the works of Titian, and to avail myself of the instructions of Tintorett and Paul Veronese. The latter honoured me with his friendship, and the venerable Titian encouraged me to visit him. I succeeded in my endeavours to cheer, with poetry and music, the declining spirits of the benevolent old man. He became attached to me, and finding that I had a painter's eye, he imparted to me some invaluable secrets of his art, a compliment the more gratifying and important, because it opened to me a source of honourable and independent provision, in case my paternal estate should never be restored to me. "Last autumn I received intelligence from Florence that my father had entered the service of your republic on his arrival in the Levant, and had received the appointment of captain in the garrison of Candia, under General Malatesta, a Florentine, whose son had been assassinated by order of Cosmo, on the discovery of an intrigue between this youth and his eldest daughter, Maria de' Medici. Nor did the hapless female escape the vengeance of her cruel parent. Her death was premature, and attended with circumstances which amounted to the clearest evidence that she was poisoned by her monstrous and unnatural parent. I had completed my preparations for departure, and waited only a change of wind to sail for Candia, when I received from my aunt the heart-rending communication that my father had shared the fate of young Malatesta, and been assassinated some years since, at the instigation of the ferocious Cosmo. This intelligence fell upon my soul like a thunderbolt. The wound which my beloved father's disappearance had inflicted on my happiness opened anew, and my lacerated heart bled at every core. I vowed implacable hatred and deadly vengeance against the prime mover and every subordinate agent in this atrocious murder of my noble parent. He was a great and admirable man, and I shall never cease to venerate his memory, and lament his untimely death. For many months, life was an intolerable burden to me, and I endured existence only in the hope of avenging him. The cruel instigator, Cosmo, was, alas! equally beyond the reach