Well, in 1567 he entered into the service of the Duke, his sovereign, and never had another happy or contented hour! The first service on which the Duke employed him, and for the performance of which he seems specially to have taken him from his professional chair, was an embassy to Venice, to congratulate the new Doge, Pietro Loredano, on his elevation to the ducal throne, to which he had been elected on the previous 19th of June. On this occasion the Professor was created Cavaliere, a title to which his landed estate of Guarina, so called from the ancestor on whom it had been originally bestowed by a former duke, fairly entitled him. Shortly afterwards he was sent as ambassador to the court of Turin; and then to that of the Emperor Maximilian at Innspruck. Then he was twice sent to Poland; the first time on the occasion of the election of Henry the Third of France to the throne of that kingdom; and the second time when Henry quitted it to ascend that of France on the death of his brother Charles IX. The object of this second embassy was to intrigue for the election to the Polish crown of Alphonso. But, as it is hardly necessary to say, his mission was unsuccessful. It seems, too, to have been well-nigh fatal to the ambassador. There is extant a letter written from Warsaw to his wife, which gives a curious and interesting account of the sufferings he endured on the journey and at the place of his destination. He tells his wife not to be discontented that his silence has been so long, but to be thankful that it was not eternal, as it was very near being! "I started, as you know, more in the fashion of a courier than of an ambassador. And that would have been more tolerable if bodily fatigue had been all. But the same hand that had to flog the horses by day, had to hold the pen by night. Nature could not bear up against this double labour of body and mind; especially after I had travelled by Serravelles and Ampez,[48] which is more disagreeable and difficult than I can tell you, from the ruggedness no less of the country than of the people, from the scarcity of horses, the miserable mode of living, and the want of every necessary. So much so that on reaching Hala[49] I had a violent fever. I embarked, however, for Vienna notwithstanding. What with fever, discouragement, an intense thirst, scarcity of remedies and of medical assistance, bad lodging, generally far to seek,[50] and often infected with disease, food disgusting, even to persons in health, bed where you are smothered in feathers, in a word, none of the necessaries or comforts of life! I leave you to imagine what I have suffered. The evil increased; my strength grew less. I lost my appetite for everything save wine. In a word, little hope remained to me of life, and that little was odious to me. There is on the Danube, which I was navigating, a vast whirlpool, so rapid that if the boatmen did not avail themselves of the assistance of a great number of men belonging to