This Platonic mania, which ran through Italian society, and, if it did nothing else, tempered its grossness and spiritualized its ideals, did not originate at Urbino, though it probably blossomed into a fashion there. Petrarch found the germ in Plato, but he developed it into fruit of quite another color, and furnished the poets after him with a new background for their fantasy-flowers. The magnificent Lorenzo, poet, ruler, patron of letters, Platonist, and buffoon, went into poetic raptures at the sight of the beautiful face of “la belle Simonetta” as she lay white and cold on the bier that passed him in the street. He dreamed of it, apostrophized it, grew melancholy over it, until he found a living face almost as lovely about which to drape the pearls of his poetic fancy. He wrote sonnets à la Petrarch, without the genuine ring of Petrarch. It was all moonlight, the pale copy of a paler emotion. But he did not in the least lose control of what he called his heart, as he dutifully married the woman his clear-headed mother chose for him; she was not at all a figure of romance and, it is to be hoped, had small knowledge of the vagaries of her theoretically Platonic husband. In any case, it was the destiny of her sex to submit to the inevitable. But the dreams of the poets naturally found an echo in the hearts of lonely women and artless maidens. When marriage was a matter of bargain and sale, a union of fortune and interest in which love played no part, sensibility was a subtle factor difficult to reckon with. A man had legally, as well as morally, supreme control over his wife. He might happen to love her and be kind to her, but if he chose to neglect her or beat her, there was no one to find fault with him. This “divine right” of man was the foundation-stone of society, and it was no more possible to question it than it was to question the divine right of popes and kings. Princesses were privileged beings who were both useful and ornamental, but this did not save them from being ill-treated to the last degree. No one thought of interfering when one of the later Medici, angry at his sister, sent for her husband and, after telling him that her frivolous conduct reflected on the decorum of his very disreputable court, bade him remember that he was a Christian and a gentleman, placed a villa at his disposal, and the hapless but too gay Isabella, who went there with suspicious reluctance, suddenly died of a convenient apoplexy, and appeared no more on this earthly scene to be a thorn in the side of her brother’s favorite, the very beautiful but too aspiring Bianca Capello. His sister-in-law, a much-wronged Spanish princess, was invited to a gloomy old castle among the hills at the same time, and disposed of in a similar way, by her amiable husband, who asked forty thousand ducats for the deed, and expiated it at once by a prayer to the Virgin, and a vow which he forgot.