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I, too, felt conscience-stricken for my homeland and for myself, when I heard, in this odd and different quarter of our large world, the Filipino Padre's true but kind moralizing over Moro's different religion. "The bells! Oh, the silver-sweet bells!" exclaimed Filippa's mother. "What odd homes! toy houses toppling over from their stilts!" I exclaimed, as we passed a remarkable village.
The cordial relations that were afterwards to exist between Lodovico and his gifted sister-in-law, the Moro's keen appreciation of Isabella's character, incline us to believe that she would have acquired great influence over her lord; and that so remarkable a woman would have played a very important part on this larger stage.
A hundred trumpeters marched before them, filling the air with strains of martial music, and the crowds, who had assembled from all parts of Lombardy, thronged around to gaze on the duchess and her daughters, and more especially on the Moro's bride. The street decorations that day were on the grandest scale.
People were everywhere seen dying of hunger and the grass growing in the squares. There were no voices in the streets, often no services in the churches. Silence and desolation reigned throughout the unhappy city. "Blessed indeed," sighs the writer, "were those who were able to seek shelter in flight." Beyond the borders of Lombardy, there were others who grieved over the Moro's fall.
There, too, is that loveliest of all Perugino's Madonnas, with the warrior Archangels at her side, and the perfect landscape beyond, which the Umbrian master painted in the last years of the century, by the Moro's express command, for his favourite sanctuary.
And so the foremost scholars and the finest artists, Giorgio Merula and Lancinus Curtius, Caradosso and Cristoforo Romano, Bramante and Leonardo, were all drawn to Milan in turn, and, having once entered the Moro's service, remained there until the end.
This is particularly noticeable in and around Zamboanga, but an officer belonging to the regiment stationed there told us a tale illustrating the Moro's love for things American, that reads like a romance.
According to Vasari and the biographer of the Magliabecchiana, who wrote about 1540, Leonardo originally attracted the Moro's notice by the surpassing charm with which he played on a silver lyre of his own invention, and afterwards fascinated him by his conversation.
In his anxiety to recover the Moro's friendship, the old king even thought of coming to Genoa himself to meet his granddaughter's husband, and arrive at some agreement. But early in the new year he fell ill, and died of fever on the 25th of January, at the age of seventy.
This political testament, which is so characteristic a monument of Lodovico's forethought and attention to detail, and of his enlightened theories of government, bears no seal or signature, but ends with the following lines in the Moro's own handwriting
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