CARDINAL BEMBO AND HIS VILLA 
else to interfere with them. Perhaps a still greater 
mark of confidence was the fact that he left Cola 
all his writings in prose or verse to be published or 
not, at his discretion. 
Nor was Bembo unmindful of the peasants who 
lived on his small estate—his little family, as he calls 
them in his letters. He took a fatherly interest in 
their concerns, protected them from the injustice of 
rapacious officials, nursed them when they were sick, 
and wept for them when they died. Many were the 
appeals which he addressed to the Podesta of Cittadella 
on behalf of these innocent contadini , whose wrongs he 
regarded as injuries to himself. One day he insisted 
on the release of a poor lad who had been arrested 
for bearing a sword, as if, in those troubled times, a 
weapon were not needed for self-defence. Another 
time he demanded the restoration of an old servant’s 
effects, which a kinsman in Ferrara had detained un¬ 
justly. “ I beg you,” he wrote to Duke Alfonso’s 
secretary, “ send for the scoundrel and give him a 
good scolding, which he richly deserves. And if you 
can recover these things, which are worth little in 
themselves, but are precious to our poor old Anna, 
I shall be as much obliged as if they were Countess 
Matilda’s dowry.” 1 When, on the Feast of the Virgin, 
a dance was given at the Villa, Bembo would write to 
1 Lettere, iii. 115. 
H3 
