Cardiere came with terror and pain written on his countenance. Last
night Lorenzo had again appeared to him in the same garb of woe; and
while he was awake and gazing with his eyes, the spectre dealt him a
blow on the cheek, to punish him for omitting to report his vision to
Piero. Michelangelo immediately gave him such a thorough scolding that
Cardiere plucked up courage, and set forth on foot for Careggi, a
Medicean villa some three miles distant from the city. He had traveled
about halfway, when he met Piero, who was riding home; so he stopped
the cavalcade, and related all that he had seen and heard. Piero
laughed him to scorn, and, beckoning the running footmen, bade them
mock the poor fellow. His Chancellor, who was afterwards the Cardinal
of Bibbiena, cried out: 'You are a madman! Which do you think Lorenzo
loved best, his son or you? If his son, would he not rather have
appeared to him than to some one else?' Having thus jeered him, they
let him go; and he, when he returned home and complained to
Michelangelo, so convinced the latter of the truth of his vision that
Michelangelo after two days left Florence with a couple of comrades,
dreading that if what Cardiere had predicted should come true, he
would no longer be safe in Florence."

This ghost-story bears a remarkable resemblance to what Clarendon
relates concerning the apparition of Sir George Villiers. Wishing to
warn his son, the Duke of Buckingham, of his coming murder at the hand
of Lieutenant Felton, he did not appear to the Duke himself, but to an
old man-servant of the family; upon which behaviour of Sir George's
ghost the same criticism has been passed as on that of Lorenzo de'
Medici.

Michelangelo and his two friends travelled across the Apennines to
Bologna, and thence to Venice, where they stopped a few days. Want of