opinion that may have been shared by not a few of the citizens
themselves. Certainly he kept a greater state and was better housed than
the duke of Valentinois' governor.

It was a jovial company of perhaps a dozen nobles and ladies that met
about his board, and Filippo bade his servants lay for me beside him. As
we ate he questioned me touching the occupation that I had found during
my absence from Pesaro. I used the greatest frankness with him, and
answered that my life had been partly a peasants, partly a poet's.

"Tell me what you wrote," he bade me his eyes resting on my face with a
new look of interest, for his love of letters was one of the few things
about him that was not affected.

"A few novelle, dealing with court-life; but chiefly verses," answered
I.

"And with these verses--what have you done?"

"I have them by me, Illustrious," I answered. He smiled, seemingly well
pleased.

"You must read them to us," he cried. "If they rival that epic of yours,
which I have never forgotten, they should be worth hearing."

And presently, supper being done, I went at his bidding to my chamber
for my precious manuscripts, and, returning, I entertained the company
with the reading of a portion of what I had written. They heard me with
an attention that might have rendered me vain had my ambition really
lain in being accounted a great writer; and when I paused, now and
again, there was a murmur of applause, and many a pat on the shoulder
from Filippo whenever a line, a phrase or a stanza took his fancy.

I was perhaps too absorbed to pay any great attention to the impression
my verses were producing, but presently, in one of my pauses, the
Lord Filippo startled me with words that awoke me to a sense of my
imprudence.

"Do you know, Lazzaro, of what your lines remind me in an extraordinary
measure?"

"Of what, Excellency?" I asked politely, raising my eyes from my
manuscript. They chanced to meet the glance of Madonna Paola. It was
riveted upon me, and its expression was one I could not understand.

"Of the love-songs of the Lord Giovanni Sforza," answered he. "They
resemble those poems infinitely more than they resemble the epic you
wrote two years ago."

I stammered something about the similarity being merely one of subject.
But he shook his head at that, and took good note of my confusion.

"No," said he, "the resemblance goes deeper. There is the same facile
beauty of the rhymes the same freshness of the