Dost thou ask me why?
I will tell thee.

Canst thou remember to have heard wild tales of thy grandsire; of his desire for a knowledge that passes that of the schools and cloisters; of a strange man from the East who was his familiar and master in lore against which the Vatican has, from age to age, launched its mimic thunder?
Dost thou call to mind the fortunes of thy ancestor ?--how he succeeded in youth to little but a name; how, after a career wild and dissolute as thine, he disappeared from Milan, a pauper, and a self-exile; how, after years spent, none knew in what climes or in what pursuits, he again revisited the city where his progenitors had reigned; how with him came the wise man of the East, the mystic Mejnour; how they who beheld him, beheld with amaze and fear that time had ploughed no furrow on his brow; that youth seemed fixed, as by a spell, upon his face and form?
Dost thou not know that from that hour his fortunes rose?
Kinsmen the most remote died; estate upon estate fell into the hands of the ruined noble.

He became the guide of princes, the first magnate of Italy.

He founded anew the house of which thou art the last lineal upholder, and transferred his splendour from Milan to the Sicilian realms.

Visions of high ambition were then present with him nightly and daily.