The Brutal First Duke Of
Their Line, Alessandro De' Medici, Who Some Say Was No Medici, But The
Bastard Of
A negro and a washerwoman, stamped his creed in the
inscription below his adoptive arms, "Under one Faith and one
Law, one
Lord," and it was in the palace here, the story goes, that the wicked
Cosimo I. killed his son Don Garzia before the eyes of the boy's mother.
Anything is imaginable of an early Medicean grand-duke, but in a manner
the father's murderous fury was provoked by the fact, if it was a fact,
that Don Garzia had just mortally wounded his brother Giovanni. I should
like to pretend that the tragedy had wrought in my unconsciousness to
the effect of the pensive gloom which the old fortress cast over me, but
perhaps I had better not. There are some gray Sunday afternoons of a
depressing effect on the spirit which requires no positive or palpable
reason.
In any case it was a relief to go from the shadow of the past there
through the pleasant city streets to the gentle quiet of the British
cemetery, where so many of our race and some even of our own nation are
taking their long rest. No one is now buried there, and the place, in
the gradual diminution of the English colony at Leghorn, has fallen into
a lovely and appealing neglect if not oblivion. Oblivion quite covers
its origin, but it is almost as old as Protestantism itself, and, if the
ground for it was the gift of the grand-duke who tolerated heretics as
well as Jews in the impulse he gave to the city's growth, it would not
be strange.
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