many besides; and he had an ardent love of books, both classical and
modern. He delighted in music, painting, architecture, and many arts
of a more mechanical description; wrote treatises on all these, and
on other subjects, especially gardening and gunnery. He was the
inventor of an improved lock to the arquebus, and first divined how
to adapt the disposition of his troops to the use of the newly-
discovered fire-arms. And in all these things his versatile head and
ready hand were personally employed, not by deputy; while coupled
with so much artistic taste was a violent passion for hunting, which
carried him through many hairbreadth 'scapes. "It was plain," he
used to say, "that God Almighty ruled the world, or how could things
go on with a rogue like Alexander VI. at the head of the Church, and
a mere huntsman like himself at the head of the Empire." His bon-
mots are numerous, all thoroughly characteristic, and showing that
brilliancy in conversation must have been one of his greatest charms.
It seems as if only self-control and resolution were wanting to have
made him a Charles, or an Alfred, the Great.

The romance of his marriage with the heiress of Burgundy is one of
the best known parts of his life. He was scarcely two-and-twenty
when he lost her, who perhaps would have given him the stability he
wanted; but his tender hove for her endured through life. It is not
improbable that it was this still abiding attachment that made him
slack in overcoming difficulties in the way of other contracts, and
that he may have hoped that his engagement to Bianca Sforza would
come to nothing, like so many others.

The most curious record of him is, however, in two books, the
materials for which he furnished, and whose composition and
illustration he superintended, Der Weise King, and Theurdank, of both