on the path beneath. Into this garden they strolledthe young men in close-fitting hose of bright and many coloured silks, and short black cloaks; the ladies in velvet and brocades of gorgeous dyes and tight-rolled masses of golden hair: a globe of colour moving through a deep green shade. They wandered on, rising slowly uphill, for the gardens lay behind the house and towards the Alps, until they came to a lawn of fine and velvety grass, studded with flowers, where the more formal garden lost itself. Beyond the lawn was a shrubbery of laurel growing as it chose; through this thicket a pathway led into a grove where the silence and the shade alike were profound. In the middle of this wood a clear stream bubbled from the living rock, welling up and filling a basin hollowed for it in the stone. Over the lips of the basin it fell, and was caught in a runnel of marble and led, with soft murmur and bickerings through light and shade, down to the gardens which it watered and kept cool. Here by this fountain the three ladies and their cavaliers sat down, and, after some slight coyness not quite real, spun out that cobweb of platonic love. through the long declining afternoon. The whole picture recalls the very spirit of Boccaccio's † introductions, of Polizian's ballate, of Giorgione and his garden-parties; it is a "never-ending Decamerone."

* See Bembo, "Degli Asolani," lib. i. op. class. Ital., No. 135 (Milano: 1808).

† See Boccaccio, Sonnet x., p. 376 of Sig. Carducci's edition; "Rime di Cinò d. Pistoia ed altri del secolo xiv.," Barbera (Firenze 1862).

For Caterina and her maids we may hope, however, that it was not all pure platonism. For her court was full of guests constantly arriving and departing; and every fifteenth day came Pandolfo Malatesta, lord of Rimini, from his castle of Cittadella, to make his suit to Caterina herself, or, as others said, to win the love of her waiting-maid Fiammeta. And her own family, the Cornari, were courting Caterina for her influence. On the strength of their sister's royalty they aspired to the title of princes; and by them she found herself forced to arrange a match between one of her nieces and a prince of the house of Naples.* But Venice watched this ambition with a jealous eye. She held that the Cornari were sufficiently rewarded by the knighthood of Giorgio and by the cardinal's hat which had been procured for his son. Venice would not permit a private family to assume exceptional rank, and administered many sharp rebukes to Caterina, warning her to live content with that state of life to which it had pleased the republic to call her, and to cease all thought of Cyprus, round which her fancy and her hopes still lingered.†

The queen really loved Asolo, her gardens, and her court, nor ever wished to leave them, summer or winter. Three times only did she make a journey from her castle. Once when the weather was so cold that men could walk from Mestre to Venice across the lagoon, the rigour of winter compelled her to return to her palace on the Grand Canal. Once too, in 1497,

* Malipiero, "Annali Veneti," p. 612.

† Roman., loc. cit., p. 437, note 1, cap. x., April 3, 1510.

she paid a visit to her brother Giorgio, then podestà in Brescia.* She was splendidly and regally received. A guard of forty youths met her outside the town; on the close-fitting hose of each were blazoned the arms of Cornaro and Lusignan. Triumphs and allegorical pageants followed: Diana and her nymphs, who meet a winged dove that sings to them; but the nymphs all stay their ears, and, falling on the boy, tear his wings from his shoulders, as they do in Signorelli's picture in our National Gallery. The queen entered the city in a chariot of state drawn by four white horses horned like unicorns. Jousts by torchlight were given in the evening, and the jousters marched in procession, with helmets on their heads from whose crests burst flame. It was Caterina's last royal ceremony, and it was continued for twelve days; then the queen returned to Asolo. But Venice showed herself jealous of this play at mimic royalty, and for the honour then done to his sister Giorgio was soon after recalled from Brescia.

The troubled condition of the mainland which resulted from the wars of the League of Cambray drove the queen from her home; Asolo was occupied by the troops of Maximilian. Caterina went to

Venice for greater safety, and died there on the 10th of July, 1510, fifty-six years old.† Her funeral displayed as much magnificence as Venice, on the verge of ruin, could afford. On the 11th of the month a bridge of boats was made across the Grand Canal from the Cornaro Palace to the other side. The dead queen

* Marin Sanudo, "Diarii," I. 741.

† Bembo, "Historia Veneta" (Basileæ: 1556), lib. x. p. 417.

There

was followed by the patriarch, the Signory, the vicedoge, the archbishop of Spalato, and an immense crowd of citizens with torches in their hands. was something fitting in the manner of her burial, for the night was a stormy one, with heavy wind and rain. On her coffin lay the crown of Cyprus-outwardly, at least, Venice insisted that her daughter was a queen; but inside her body lay shrouded in the habit of St. Francis, with cord and cowl and coarse brown cloak. Caterina was carried to the Cornaro chapel in the Church of the Sant' Apostoli, and next day the funeral service was performed. Over her grave Andrea Navagero, poet, scholar, and ambassador, made the oration that bade farewell to this unhappy queen, whose beauty, goodness, gentleness, and grace were unavailing to save her from the tyrannous cruelty of fate.

THE SPANISH CONSPIRACY:

AN EPISODE IN THE DECLINE OF VENICE.

THE Spanish Conspiracy, by the timely discovery of which Venice was believed to have narrowly escaped destruction in 1618, is one of those episodes in history which at once arrest attention by focussing the conditions of a period and throwing a flood of light upon subsequent events. In diabolical picturesqueness this conspiracy takes rank with the Gunpowder Plot or the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew. Owing partly to the doubts thrown upon its reality at the very outset, partly also to the silence of the Venetian government, to the mystification of some contemporaries, and the declared scepticism of others, the whole affair has acquired the fascination of a riddle. It has attracted abundant research, and has even found its way into dramatic literature in the best of Otway's tragedies, "Venice Preserved." At the time there was a French answer, a Spanish answer, a Neapolitan answer, a Turkish answer to this riddle, and subsequent historians, Capriata, San Real, Chambrier, Daru, have each adopted one or other of these solutions. No one of the answers, however, is quite satisfactory, nor covers the whole ground of our information so as to