gatherings of beauty and wit and gallantry described by Bandello. History shows us that most typical lady of Italian society dancing with the King of France at the great ball which the usurping monarch gave in 1507, in the Castello of Milan, in the very halls where her sister and brother-in-law had once reigned—a spectacle significant of fallen Italy. Like the princes of the neighbouring States, the great nobles of Milan, once powerful in the story of their city, had lost all patriotic and independent spirit. The severe repression of party-passion, that unfailing symptom of vigorous life in an Italian community, by the French conquerors in 1500, reduced them to idleness and political nullity. They made friends with the new powers and entered their service, but they had no longer any real influence on affairs. The revolutions which placed the Sforza princes on the ducal throne in turn afforded the nobles opportunities of intrigue and brought home to them the terrible realities of foreign subjugation. In 1521, for example, those who had embraced the side of the old dynasty suffered the reprisals of the savage Lautrec, and on mere suspicion Milan was desolated of its noblest inhabitants by summary executions, banishment and forfeiture. These families were, however, restored to their old position by the elevation of Francesco Sforza to the Dukedom, and they made no attempt to rebel against the Imperial Eagle, which was their real master. When the intolerable persecution inflicted by the Spanish and German mercenaries from 1525 to 1529 maddened the people to repeated insurrection, not one of the nobles came forward to give them courage and to organise and direct their undisciplined efforts to effective action. A certain Pietro della Pusterla, of a House which through all the story of Milan had been distinguished as leaders of popular movements, seems to have assumed some authority over them, but even he abandoned them in the hour of need and danger. These futile attempts exhausted the last remains of aspiration for liberty and self-government in the broken-spirited Milanese. They made no attempt to rebel against the settlement of 1530, which resigned them finally into the Emperor’s hands. Though utterly dismayed—_tutto smarrito_, says Burigozzo—by the heavy fine inflicted by Charles as a penalty for the rebellion of the Duchy, they resigned themselves to _patientia_ and hope for better days to come.