It is surely unnecessary to make any apology for this second edition of the Memoirs of the Dukes of Urbino. Notwithstanding all that has been done in the last fifty years by historians on the one hand, and by imaginative writers on the other, with the object of elucidating the history of that part of Central Italy which lies within the ancient confines of Umbria, or of appreciating the humanism of that Court which was once a pattern for the world, this book of James Dennistoun's remains the standard authority to which every writer within or without Italy must go in dealing in any way with these subjects. This very honourable achievement has been won for the book by the eager and methodical research of the author, who made himself acquainted with all available original sources, and in the years of his sojourn in Italy must have read and turned over a vast number of MSS., of which some have since been printed in various Bollettini, but a great number still remain in those Italian libraries which, always without an efficient catalogue and often without an excuse for one, are at once the delight and the despair of the curious student. For this reason, if for no other, such a work as this was not easy to supersede, and so, though a later writer always has an advantage, it was not outmoded by the careful and loving work of Ugolini in his Storia de' Conti e Duchi d'Urbino, which was written, I think, in exile.