succeeding generation of the Gonzagas, was a mere matter of form,
and of course.

The next prince, Lodovico Gonzaga, was an austere man, and had been
bred in a hard school, if I may believe some of our old chroniclers,
whom, indeed, I sometimes suspect of being not altogether faithful. It
is said that his father loved his younger brother better than him,
and that Lodovico ran away in his boyhood, and took refuge with his
father's hereditary enemies, the Visconti. To make dates agree,
it must have been the last of these, for the line failed during
Lodovico's time, and he had wars with the succeeding Sforza. In the
day of his escapade, Milan was at war with Mantua and with Venice, and
the Marquis Gonzaga was at the head of the united armies, as we have
already seen. So the father and son met in several battles; though
the Visconti, out of love for the boy, and from a sentiment of piety
somewhat amazing in them, contrived that he should never actually
encounter his parent face to face. Lodovico came home after the wars,
wearing a long beard; and his mother called her son "the Turk," a
nickname that he never lost.

Il Turco was a lover of the arts and of letters, and he did many
works to enrich and beautify the city. He established the first
printing-office in Mantua, where the first book printed was the
"Decamerone" of Boccaccio. He founded a college of advocates, and he
dug canals for irrigation; and the prosperity of Mantuan manufacturers
in his time may be inferred from the fact that, when the King of
Denmark paid him a visit, in 1474, the merchants decked their shops
with five thousand pieces of fine Mantuan cloth.

The Marquis made his brilliant little court the resort of the arts and
letters; and hither from Florence came once the elegant Politian, who
composed his tragedy of "Orfeo" in Mantua, and caused it to be first
represented before Lodovico. But it must be confessed that this was
a soil in which art flourished better than literature, and that even
born Mantuan poets went off, after a while, and blossomed in other
air. The painter Mantegna, whom the Marquis invited from Padua, passed
his whole life here, painting for the Marquis in the palaces and
churches. The prince loved him, and gave him a house, and bestowed
other honors upon him; and Mantegna executed for Lodovico his famous
pictures representing the Triumph of Julius Caesar. [Now at Hamilton
Court, in England.] It was divided into nine compartments, a