Romances Volume 41 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1896 edition. Excerpt: ... CELEBRATED CRIMES. THE BORGIAS. CHAPTER I. On the 8th of April, 1492, in a chamber of the Careggi Palace, situated about a league from Florence, three men were grouped around a bed, upon which a fourth was lying in the agonies of death. The first, seated near his feet, and half concealed by the curtains of gold brocade (as if to hide his tears), was Erraolao Barbaro, the author of the treatises " On Celibacy " and " Studies on Pliny," who, being at Rome as the accredited ambassador of the Florentine republic, had been raised in the preceding year to the patriarchate of Aquileia by Pope Innocent VIII. The second, kneeling and still pressing the hands of the dying man between his own, was Angelo Politiano, the Catullus of the fifteenth century, whose mind was so imbued by the classic spirit of antiquity that we might almost consider him to have been a poet of the Augustan period. The third, standing near his head, and watching with the deepest grief the coming shadows of death over the face of the sufferer, was the illustrious Pico of Mirandola, who at twenty years of age had offered to reply in twenty-two languages to seven hundred questions VOL. I. -- 1 to be proposed by twenty of the most learned men of the age, if they could be assembled in Florence. The object of this solicitude was Lorenzo the Magnificent, who, attacked at the beginning of the year by a violent fever, which was aggravated by the hereditary malady of his family, the gout, and finding that the drinks of dissolved pearls, which the charlatan Leoni di Spoleto had ordered him to take, as if to regulate his remedies rather by the superfluity of wealth than the urgency of disease, were powerless and vain, and that he must resign the charms of social intercourse, -- the...