. . .Then when Guicciardini and Vettori reproved him for this, observing that his ball could count only for one, he replied: "If you had decided beforehand what you intended to do, there was no need of calling me;" and he rose to depart; but Cardinal Cybo detained him with cunning mildness, and endeavored to frighten him with the show of the surrounding arms, and representing the danger which he might incur; but the brave man, not at all startled, replied: "Sir Cardinal, I am already more than sixty-two years old, so that 59 now they can do me but very little harm." These are magnanimous examples, which can never be remembered or praised enough; and as many times as I consider that Benedetto Varchi wrote these histories by order of Cosimo, and read them to him, and that he listened to them without showing any resentment, I feel forced to conclude, that men capable of telling the truth seem to me even more rare than Princes capable of listening to it, and that adulation is. . . Read More