"All these reflections, gentlemen, have induced me to address myself to you who have been chosen by the king for the task of rectifying abuses. I am not the only one who thinks thus. How many laborers in Lyons and other places, how many laborers in the kingdom are reduced to the same extremities as myself? It is evident that every holiday costs the state several millions (livres). These considerations will lead you to take more to heart the interests of the people, which are rather too little attended to. "I have the honor to be, etc., "BOCEN." This request, which was really presented, will not be misplaced in a work like the present. SECTION III. The feast given to the Roman people by Julius Cæsar and the emperors who succeeded him are well known. The feast of twenty-two thousand tables served by twenty-two thousand purveyors; the naval fights on artificial lakes, etc., have not, however, been imitated by the Herulian, Lombard, and Frankish chieftains, who would have their festivity equally celebrated. FERRARA. What we have to say of Ferrara has no relation to literature, but it has a very great one to justice, which is much more necessary than the belles-lettres, and much less cultivated, at least in Italy. Ferrara was constantly a fief of the empire, like Parma and Placentia. Pope Clement VIII. robbed Cæsar d'Este of it by force of arms, in 1597. The pretext for this tyranny was a very singular one for a man who called himself the humble vicar of Jesus Christ. Alphonso d'Este, the first of the name, sovereign of Ferrara, Modena, Este, Carpio, and Rovigno, espoused a simple gentlewoman of Ferrara, named Laura Eustochia, by whom he had three children before marriage. These children he solemnly acknowledged in the face of the Church. None of the formalities prescribed by the laws were wanting at this recognition. His successor, Alphonso d'Este, was acknowledged duke of Ferrara; he espoused Julia d'Urbino, the daughter of Francis, duke d'Urbino, by whom he had the unfortunate Cæsar d'Este, the incontestable heir of all the property of all the family, and declared so by the last duke, who died October 27, 1597. Pope Clement VIII., surnamed Aldobrandino, and originally of the family of a merchant of Florence, dared to pretend that the grandmother of Cæsar d'Este was not sufficiently noble, and that the children that she had brought into the world ought to be considered bastards. The first reason is ridiculous and scandalous in a bishop, the second is unwarrantable in every tribunal in Europe. If the duke was not legitimate, he ought to have lost Modena and his other states also; and if there was no flaw in his title, he ought to have kept Ferrara as well as Modena.