I was telling my pretty companion something of my own life, how, because I loved Italy so well, I lived in Tuscany in preference to living in England, and how each year I came home for a month or two to visit my relations and to keep in touch with things.

But the Tuscans soon divined the real intention of the French, and the Provisional Government in Florence, previously instituted under Bettino Ricasoli, suddenly avowed its intention of uniting Tuscany to Sardinia, whereupon Prince Napoleon, seeing the true attitude of the country, found it advisable to affect to promote the annexation.

But the Apennines which separate Tuscany from the Romagna are very difficult to cross, especially for sumpter-horses; as therefore the Gauls could not enter Etruria on that sidewhich the Etruscans had intentionally allowed to grow wildand as they had been convinced of this in an unsuccessful attempt, they crossed the Apennines in the neighborhood of Clusium, and appeared before that city.

The Duke of Tuscany at this time was exceedingly anxious that he should take up his final abode at Florence; and Buonarroti, feeling he had now no strong support in Rome, seems to have entertained these proposals with alacrity.

The negotiations with Sardinia and Tuscany for an Italian league were advanced nearly to completion.

The kingdom of the two Sicilies in the South, the grand duchy of Tuscany on the West, and the smaller duchies of Parma, Modena, and Lucca were only stable in so far as Austria bolstered up their corrupt and unpopular governments.

They were "thinking," perhaps, less in Tuscany than in any other part of the peninsula, for they were eating more and better there.

[104] These tombs in the Badia were erected for Count Ugo, Governor of Tuscany under Otho II., and for Messer Bernardo Giugni.

Luigi Pulci, son of Jacopo Pulci and Brigida de' Bardi, was of a noble family, so ancient as to be supposed to have come from France into Tuscany with his hero Charlemagne.

Its Ghibelline sympathies involved it in terrible struggles, in which it gradually sank till its fortunes were merged in those of Tuscany about 1550.

"About three years after their nuptials, the young Archduke, the issue of Francesco's previous marriage, died, leaving the ducal throne of Tuscany without direct heir; failing which the Cardinal Ferdinand would become Grand-duke at the death of his brother.

It was in the middle of the thirteenth century, during the long struggle for independence carried on by the republics of Lombardy and Tuscany against the Empire and the nobles, that some of the most durable and splendid public works were executed.

* It requires no great stretch of the imagination to picture the morals and the manners of society in Tuscany during the last half of the sixteenth century.

In 1797 it had ended in the destruction of most of them; it had ended in the virtual deposition of the King of Sardinia, it had ended in the conversion of Genoa and Tuscany into democratic republics; it had ended in the revolution of Venice, in the violation of treaties with the new Venetian republic; and finally, in transferring that very republic, the creature and vassal of France, to the dominion of Austria.

The situation had been given to him by the Fossombrone of his day, without a word having been said in the journals of Tuscany of his doubts about accepting it, and everything passed, as things are apt to pass when there are true simplicity and good faith at the bottom, without pretension or comment.

I put Tuscany out of the question, as it is a sort of family estate of the House of Austria, in which she has a right by treaty to interfere.