I honor your cunning, signor, but if you are indeed a gentleman, as I have always heard, you will now withdraw and permit me to regard the matter from a standpoint other than my own.

The dignified signor who addressed them wore the violet robe and stole of a secretary of the Doge, and his face was the face of that secretary in whose silken hand the gastaldo's had lain prisoned when he took the oath of office!

How sweetly pretty to see the two lovely friends, when humbled and tame, both sitting in the darkest corner of a room, arm in arm, weeping and sobbing for each other!and I their emperor, their then acknowledged emperor, reclined at my ease in the same room, uncertain to which I should first, grand signor like, throw out my handkerchief!

She was so surprised that this "grave and reverend signor," as she called him, should be able to valse!

Petitioning the native city of his ancestors (Bergamo) to intercede for him with the duke, he speaks of the writer as "this unhappy person;" and subscribes himself, "Most illustrious Signors, your affectionate servant, Torquato Tasso, a prisoner, and infirm, in the hospital of St. Anne in Ferrara.

These most potent, grave, and reverend signors were set down to whist, and were so studiously attentive to the game, that the unlucky brat found little difficulty in fastening to the backs of their chairs the flowing tails of their ample periwigs and in cutting, unobserved by them, the tyes of their breeches.