Netherlands we re undertaken for the purpose of study: by means of them
he gained an accurate knowledge of the industry and commerce of these
countries. It is ridiculous to reproach him with the turner's work
which he practiced in his leisure hours, connected as it was with his
skill in the casting of cannon, and with the unprejudiced freedom with
which he surrounded himself by masters of every art. The Italian
princes were not, like their contemporaries in the North, dependent on
the society of an aristocracy which held itself to be the only class
worth consideration, and which infected the monarch with the same
conceit. In Italy the prince was permitted and compelled to know and to
use men of every grade in society; and the nobility, though by birth a
caste, were forced in social intercourse to stand up on their personal
qualifications alone. But this is a point which we shall discuss more
fully in the sequel. The feeling of the Ferrarese towards the ruling
house was a strange compound of silent dread, of the truly Italian
sense of well-calculated interest, and of the loyalty of the modern
subject: personal admiration was transferred into a new sentiment of
duty. The city of Ferrara raised in 1451 a bronze equestrian statue to
their Prince Niccolo, who had died ten years earlier; Borso (1454) did
not scruple to place his own statue, also of bronze, but in a sitting
posture, hard by in the market; in addition to which the city, at the
beginning of his reign, decreed to him a 'marble triumphal pillar .' A
citizen who, when abroad in Venice, had spoken ill of Borso in public,
was informed against on his return home, and condemned to banishment
and the confiscation of his goods; a loyal subject was with difficulty
restrained from cutting him down before the tribunal itself, and with a
rope round his neck the offender went to the duke and begged for a full
pardon. The government was well provided with spies, and the duke
inspected personally the daily list of travellers which the innkeepers
were strictly ordered to present. Under Borso, who was anxious to leave