duke entering the temple, they immediately killed him. Lampugnani was slain on the spot by a Moorish servant of the duke's; Visconti was soon afterwards taken and put to death. Olgiati, taken the last of all, was likewise put to death with the most horrible tortures. A confession, or rather statement of the conspiracy, drawn up from the relation of Olgiati, then twenty-two years of age, by order of his judges, and in the agonies of torments, still exists, in which a man of extraordinary fortitude is recognized. He never appears once to repent of what he has done. He met his death with the courage of a martyr, and the resignation of a Christian, but he never acknowledged himself guilty before God of what he had done. "I know," he said to the priest who attended him during the excruciating torments by which he was put to death, "that my poor body deserves this and greater punishment, if it could bear it, for my sins. But for the glorious deed for which I suffer, I hope to be rewarded by the Almighty; for I know the purity of my motives. I would suffer a thousand times the same death cheerfully; and were I to die and revive again ten times, I would ten times do the same." He only once moaned; but he soon checked himself, saying, " Collige te, Hieronyme; habet vetus memoria facti: mors acerba, fama perpetua." His undaunted stoicism was the means of accelerating his death, as the executioners themselves were moved by it, and it was thought that his example might be dangerous. An epigram which he composed when he heard from the place where he was concealed the noise of the mob dragging along the streets the body of his friend Lampugnani, has been preserved.

Quem non armatæ potuerunt mille phalanges
Sternere, privata Galeaz Dux Sfortia dextra
Concidit: atque illum minime juvere cadentem
Astantes famuli, nec opes, nec castra, nec urbes.

Unde patet sævo tutum nil esse tyranno.

But the consequences of Galeazzo's death were far different from what the conspirators expected. His eldest son, then eight years of age, was nominally his successor, but the throne was usurped by Lodovico the Moor, an abominable traitor, to whom Italy owed the invasion of Charles VIII. of France. Ludovico by that invasion, in the end, lost both his throne and his liberty, and it is from that time that an incessant succession of misfortunes and calamities has poured upon Italy. Milan, after many vicissitudes, became an Austrian province, and afterwards, under Napoleon, was the capital of the little kingdom of Italy. In 1814 it returned under the yoke of its former master, the German emperor, who, by the iron rod with which he rules Lombardy, and more particularly Milan, amply revenges the humiliations to which his predecessor, Frederic Barbarossa, was of old subjected by the Lombards, more especially by the then brave Milanese. From the loss of its independence, Milan, like the rest of Italy, has fallen into complete oblivion with respect to the civilized world. Despotism has effeminated the people, blighted their glory, and dried up every source of opulence. Nothing that formed the ancient renown of Milan, even in a commercial point of view, now remains. Its rich manufactories, both of swords and armour, so famous through all the world, have now disappeared; a person surveying Milan in its present state will scarcely believe that a spirit of industry and com

mercial enterprise was ever cultivated in a place now debased and ruined by a degrading government. It is scarcely then worth while to notice the idleness of the assertion so often repeated, that no man of talents is to be reckoned among the Milanese. The city, where the Emperors Julian the Apostate and Maximian were born, and among the names of whose native citizens we meet with those of Marechal Trivulgio, and in more modern times of Beccaria and Verri, of Farini and Faveroni, of Manzoni and Grossi—this city cannot in fairness be accused of not having contributed its full share to the glorious list of names which shed so much lustre (the only consolation of which that unhappy country cannot be deprived, either by jesuitical cunning or by Austrian feudality) on the Ausonian peninsula.

K

LAKE OF COM O.

Edificio enim jam

Edificare te scribis, bene est: inveni patrocinium. ratione quia tecum. Nam hoc quoque non dissimile, quod ad mare tu, ego ad Larium Lacum. Hujus in littore plures villæ meæ, sed duæ ut maxime delectant, ita exercent.

PLIN. EPIST.

I love to sail along the Larian Lake,
Under the shore-though not to visit Pliny,
To catch him musing in his plane-tree walk,
Or fishing, as he might be, from his window.

ROGERS.

THE Lake of Como, the Lacus Larius of the ancients, is upwards of thirty miles long, and between two and three miles broad. It is divided into two branches, one of which leads directly to the town of Como, while the other, called the Lake of Lecco, discharges the Adda, and communicates, by means of that river and its canals, with Milan. The borders of the lake are lofty hills, covered with vines, chestnut, walnut, and almond trees, and enlivened with numerous villages. The temperature is mild, and not only the inhabitants of Milan, but numerous strangers, amongst whom are many English, retreat to the delightful villas with which the lake is surrounded. Like its neighbour the Benacus, the Lacus Larius is subject to tempests, which sometimes render its navigation dangerous. It is, indeed, included by Virgil in the same line with the stormy Benacus.

Tu Lari, maxime, tuque

Fluctibus et fremitu assurgans, Benace, marino.

In consequence of the lake being fed by the melting of the snow on the neighbouring mountains, the water is higher in summer than in winter.

On the eastern side of the lake is situated the Pliniana, a villa belonging to a Milanese nobleman, and supposed to be the site of one of Pliny's beautiful residences on the borders of the Lacus Larius. He has himself described the situation of two. "We are pretty much agreed, likewise, I find, in our situations; and as your buildings are carrying on upon the sea-coast, mine are rising upon the site of the Larian lake. I have several villas upon the borders of this lake, but there are two particularly in which I take most delight, so they give me most employment. They are both situated like those at Baiæ; one of them stands upon a rock, and has a prospect of the lake, the other actually touches it. The first, supported as it were by the lofty buskin, I call my tragic; the other, as resting upon the humble sock, my comic villa. They have each their particular beauties, which recommend themselves to me so much the more, as they are of different kinds. The former commands a wider prospect of the lake; the latter enjoys a nearer view of it. This, by an easy bend, embraces a little bay; the promontory upon which the other stands forms two. Here you have a straight walk extending itself along the banks of the lake; there a spacious terrace that falls by a gentle descent towards it. The former does not feel the force of the waves, the latter breaks them; from that you see the fishing vessels below; from this you may fish yourself,