Hope began to desert him. He was sought, not by friends and admirers, but by officers of justice, and fleeing miserably from one refuge to another, was soon captured. In his dungeon, the mind of the young man—he was twenty-three—maintained its exaltation, though it was a wonder, says Corio, that amid such torments as he underwent, the afflicted spirit did not abandon the agonised body. He managed to compose a long relation in Latin of all the circumstances of the plot, a document of poignant human interest which shows the effect of the prevailing enthusiasm for antiquity upon a serious and lofty soul. Even at the last frightful moment, when the iron of the executioner was at his breast, the fainting youth had courage to animate himself in the tongue of Brutus and Cato with the words—_Collect thyself, Hieronimo. The memory of thy deed shall live long. Mors acerba, fama perpetua!_ CHAPTER VII _The Opening of the Gate_ “Il Duca perse lo Stato e la roba e la libertà, e nessuna sua opera si finì per lui.”—LEONARDO DA VINCI. If the great movements of history could ever be said to turn on the existence of an individual, one might regard as the paradoxical result of Galeazzo Maria’s death the loss of Italy’s freedom. The young Milanese Brutus, in his noble rage against tyranny, little foresaw the three centuries of dark and hopeless servitude which by the unimpassioned workings of fate his blow would indirectly bring upon his country. The exclamation of the cynical Sixtus IV. at the news of the murder—_To-day is the peace of Italy dead_,—showed a clearer vision. The scheming Pope saw and gauged the unstable elements in the situation—the ambition of Naples and Venice, the helplessness of Duke Galeazzo’s ten-year-old successor, the contagion of disorder throughout Italy; remembered the aggressive Turk in the east, the adventurous Frank in the north, and forthwith set to work to precipitate the inevitable upheaval in the interests of his own family.