honoured readers, live in happiness and contentment. Venice, February 1, 1589." We must, I think, nevertheless be permitted to doubt the contentment and happiness of the life he led, as it should seem, for the next four years, at Venice. No such decision of any kind, as he hoped from the Duke of Savoy, was forthcoming. He was shunted! He had quarrelled with his own sovereign, and evidently the other would have none of him. The Italians of one city were in those days to a wonderful degree foreigners in another ruled by a different government; and there can be little doubt that Guarini wandered among the quays and "calle" of Venice, or paced the great piazza at the evening hour, a moody and discontented man! At last, after nearly four years of this sad life, there came an invitation from the Duke of Mantua proposing that Guarini should come to Mantua together with his son Alessandro, to occupy honourable positions in that court. The poet, heartily sick of "retirement," accepted at once, and went to Mantua. But there, too, another disappointment awaited him. The "magnanimous" Duke Alphonso would not tolerate that the man who had so cavalierly left his service should find employment elsewhere. It is probable that this position was obtained for him by the influence of his old friend and fellow-member of the "Etherials" at Padua, Scipione Gonzaga; and it would seem that he occupied it for a while, and went on behalf of the Duke of Mantua to Innspruck, whence he wrote the wonderful letters which have been quoted. The Cardinal's influence, however, was not strong enough to prevail against the spite of a neighbouring sovereign. There are two letters extant from the Duke, or his private secretary, to that same Coccapani whom we saw so scandalized at Guarini's hurried and informal departure from Ferrara, and who was residing as Alphonso's representative at Mantua, in which the Minister is instructed to represent to the Duke of Mantua that his brother of Ferrara "did not think it well that the former should take any of the Guarini family into his service, and when they should see each other he would tell him his reasons. For the present he would only say that he wished the Duke to know that it would be excessively pleasing to him if the Duke would have nothing to say to any of them."