slipping hastily in his barge along the canals between Milan and his favourite country palace of Abbiategrasso. This dark habit of life made him odious to the sunny-tempered Milanese. They shuddered at this pale fat man, who increased their horror by condemning his own wife to death in 1418. To Beatrice Tenda and her vast dowry Filippo owed almost entirely his possession of the Dukedom. Her years much exceeded her second husband’s, though the Duke, like his father, had never been young. Because he was tired of her, or because she was cross and avaricious, as the chroniclers variously aver, or more probably because she had served her purpose and was no longer of any use to him, Filippo accused her of infidelity. She was arrested and carried to the Castle of Binasco, together with her supposed lover, a handsome young knight, Michele Orombello, who had solaced her dreary existence with his skill upon the lute, and after having resisted torture inflicted to make her confess herself guilty, she was beheaded. Orombello and two of her ladies shared her fate. Ten years later the Duke married, for political reasons, the Princess Maria of Savoy. This poor lady was hardly less to be pitied than Beatrice. The Duke neglected her himself, yet jealously kept her secluded from all but her own women, allowing no man to appear in her presence. Meanwhile Agnese del Maino, the lady who had secured the tyrant’s affections, reigned in the Castle as his wife in all but name. Filippo’s love for Agnese, a woman of spirit and culture, and his devotion to the daughter she bore him, his only child, Bianca Maria, were human traits in his otherwise unamiable character. Though no lover of learning, Filippo continued, as much as circumstances allowed, the Viscontean patronage of culture and letters, the tradition that had descended from his ancestors, the hosts of Petrarca. He kept up the University of Pavia and called great scholars to its chairs. The celebrated humanist, Pier Candido Decembrio, was for many years his secretary. He employed artists of renown, including Brunelleschi and Pisanello, in various works. To his daughter the Duke was careful to give the scholarly training which with the revival of learning had become a necessary ornament for the women as well as the men of the great Italian Houses, and Bianca Maria added the accomplishments of Latin and Greek to the beauty and spirit with which nature had endowed her.