After that his old friend the Duchess of Urbino once again stood his friend, and he obtained a position in the court of Urbino, then one of the most widely famed centres of cultivation and letters in Italy. And for a while everything seemed at last to be well with him there. On the 23rd of February, 1603, he writes to his sister, who apparently had been pressing him to come home to Ferrara:--"I should like to come home, my sister. I have great need and a great desire for home; but I am treated so well here, and with so much distinction and so much kindness, that I cannot come. I must tell you that all expenses for myself and my servants are supplied, so that I have not to spend a farthing for anything in the world that I need. The orders are that anything I ask for should be furnished to me. Besides all which, they give me three hundred crowns a year; so that, what with money and expenses, the position is worth six hundred crowns a year to me. You may judge, then, if I can throw it up. May God grant you every happiness! Your brother, B. GUARINI." But all would not do. He had been but a very little time in this little Umbrian Athens among the Apennines before he once again threw up his position in anger and disgust, because he did not obtain all the marks of distinction to which he thought that he was entitled. This was in 1603. He was now sixty-six, and seems at length to have made no further attempt to haunt at court. Once again he was at Rome in 1605, having undertaken, at the request of the citizens of Ferrara, to carry their felicitations to the new Pope, Paul the Fifth. And with the exception of that short expedition his last years were spent in the retirement of his ancestral estate of Guarina.