The whole of this system excited the deep and persistent hatred of the Florentine writers of that epoch. Even the pomp and display with which the despot was perhaps less anxious to gratify his own vanity than to impress the popular imagination, awakened their keenest sarcasm. Woe to an adventurer if he fell into their hands, like the upstart Doge Aguello of Pisa (1364), who used to ride out with a golden sceptre, and show himself at the window of his house, ‘as relics are shown.’ reclining on embroidered drapery and cushions, served like a pope or emperor, by kneeling attendants.[16] More often, however, the old Florentines speak on this subject in a tone of lofty seriousness. Dante saw and characterised well the vulgarity and commonplace which mark the ambition of the new princes.[17] ‘What mean their trumpets and their bells, their horns and their flutes; but come, hangman--come, vultures?’ The castle of the tyrant, as pictured by the popular mind, is a lofty and solitary building, full of dungeons and listening-tubes,[18] the home of cruelty and misery. Misfortune is foretold to all who enter the service of the despot,[19] who even becomes at last himself an object of pity: he must needs be the enemy of all good and honest men; he can trust no one, and can read in the faces of his subjects the expectation of his fall. ‘As despotisms rise, grow, and are consolidated, so grows in their midst the hidden element which must produce their dissolution and ruin.’[20] But the deepest ground of dislike has not been stated; Florence was then the scene of the richest development of human individuality, while for the despots no other individuality could be suffered to live and thrive but their own and that of their nearest dependents. The control of the individual was rigorously carried out, even down to the establishment of a system of passports.[21] The astrological superstitions and the religious unbelief of many of the tyrants gave, in the minds of their contemporaries, a peculiar colour to this awful and God-forsaken existence. When the last Carrara could no longer defend the walls and gates of the plague-stricken Padua, hemmed in on all sides by the Venetians (1405), the soldiers of the guard heard him cry to the devil ‘to come and kill him.’