numerous sons, her relatives upon the mother’s side.  In consequence of this determination, she was first affianced to an heir of that house, who died; again to another, who also died; and in the third place to their brother, called Lelio, whom she eventually married in the year 1591.  Lelio was then twenty-five years of age, and Lucrezia nineteen.  Her beauty was so distinguished, that in poems written on the ladies of Lucca it received this celebration in a madrigal:—­

    Like the young maiden rose
      Which at the opening of the dawn,
        Still sprinkled with heaven’s gracious dew,
      Her beauty and her bosom on the lawn
    Doth charmingly disclose,
        For nymphs and amorous swains with love to view;
    So delicate, so fair, Lucrezia yields
    New pearls, new purple to our homely fields,
        While Cupid plays and Flora laughs in her fresh hue.

Less than a year after her marriage with Lelia Buonvisi, Lucrezia resumed her former intimacy with Massimiliano Arnolfini.  He was scarcely two yeara her elder, and they had already exchanged vows of fidelity in Ferrara.  Massimiliano’s temper inclined him to extreme courses; he was quick and fervent in all the disputes of his age, ready to back his quarrels with the sword, and impatient of delay in any matter he had undertaken.  Owing to a feud which then subsisted between the families of Arnolfini and Boccella, he kept certain bravi in his service, upon whose devotion he relied.  This young man soon found means to open a correspondence with Lucrezia, and arranged meetings with her in the house of some poor weavers who lived opposite the palace of the Buonvisi.  Nothing passed between them that exceeded the limits of respectful courtship.  But the situation became irksome to a lover so hot of blood as Massimiliano was.  On the evening of June 5, in 1593, his men attacked Lelio Buonvisi, while returning with Lucrezia from prayers in an adjacent church.  Lelio fell, stabbed with nineteen thrusts of the poignard, and was carried lifeless to his house.  Lucrezia made her way back alone; and when her husband’s corpse was brought into the palace, she requested that it should be laid out in the basement.  A solitary witness of this act of violence, Vincenzo di Coreglia, deposed to having raised the dying man from the ground, put earth into his mouth by way of Sacrament, and urged him to forgive his enemies before he breathed his last.  The weather had been very bad that day, and at nightfall it was thundering incessantly.

Inquisition was made immediately into the causes of Lelio’s death.  According to Lucrezia’s account, her husband had reproved some men upon the road for singing obscene songs, whereupon they turned and murdered him.  The corpse was exposed in the Church of the Servi, where multitudes of people gathered round it; and there an ancient dame of the Buonvisi house, flinging herself upon her nephew’s body,