on the Lake of Garda, viewed the situation with patient indifference.
When asked by a messenger of his rival when and how he thought of
returning to Milan, he gave the reply, 'By the same means as those by
which I was expelled, but not till his crimes have outweighed my own.'
Sometimes, too, the despot was sacrificed by his relations, with the
view of saving the family, to the public conscience which he had too
grossly outraged. In a few cases the government was in the hands of the
whole family, or at least the ruler was bound to take their advice; and
here, too, the distribution of property and influence often led to
bitter disputes.

The whole of this system excited the deep and persistent hatred of the
Florentine writers of that epoch. Even the pomp and display with which
the despot was perhaps less anxious to gratify his own vanity than to
impress the popular imagination, awakened their keenest sarcasm. Woe to
an adventurer if he fell into their hands, like the upstart Doge
Agnello of Pisa (1364), who used to ride out with a golden scepter, and
show himself at the window of his house, 'as relics are shown,'
reclining on embroidered drapery and cushions, served like a pope or
emperor, by kneeling attendants. More often, however, the old
Florentines speak on this subject in a tone of lofty seriousness. Dante
saw and characterized well the vulgarity and commonplace which marked
the ambition of the new princes. 'What else mean their trumpets and
their bells, their horns and their flutes, but "come, hangmen come,
vultures!"' The castle of the tyrant, as pictured by the popular mind,
is lofty and solitary, full of dungeons and listening-tubes, the home
of cruelty and misery. Misfortune is foretold to all who enter the
service of the despot, who even becomes at last himself an object of
pity: he must needs be the enemy of all good and honest men: he can
trust no one and can read in the faces of his subjects the expectation