deeds which threw a shadow over these sunny regions,
where the strange medley of luxury and vice, of refinement and cruelty,
recalled the days of Imperial Rome. But the balmy breath of these
Southern climes, the soft luxuriant spell of blue seas and groves of
palm and cassia, sank deep into the child's being, and something of the
fire and passion, the mirth and gaiety, of the dwellers in this
delicious land passed into her soul, and helped to mould her nature
during these years that she spent far from mother and sister at King
Ferrante's court.

In these early days many personages with whom she was to be closely
associated in after-years were living at Naples. There were scholars and
poets whom she was to meet again in Milan at her husband's court, and
who would be glad to remind her that they had known her as a child in
her grandfather's palace. There was Pontano, the founder of the Academy
of Naples, who was busy writing his Latin eclogues on the myrtle bowers
of Baiae and the orange groves of Sorrento. There was her aunt, the
accomplished Ippolita Sforza, Duchess of Calabria, who had learnt Greek
of the great teacher Lascaris in her young days at Milan, and whose
wedding had brought the magnificent Lorenzo to the court of the Sforzas.
And for playmates the little Beatrice had Ippolita's children: the boy
Ferrante, whose chivalrous nature endeared him to his Este cousins, even
when their husbands joined with the French invaders to drive him from
his father's throne; and the girl Isabella, who was already affianced to
the young Duke Giangaleazzo, who was in future years to become her
companion and rival at the court of Milan. Here, too, in the summer of
1479, came a new visitor in the shape of Duchess Ippolita's brother,
Lodovico Sforza, surnamed _Il Moro_, himself the younger son of the
great Duke Francesco. On his elder brother Sforza's death, the King of
Naples had invested him with the duchy of Bari, and now he promised him
men and money with which to assert his claims against his sister-in-law,
the widowed Duchess Bona and the minions who had driven him and his
brothers out of their native land. In June, 1477, only a few days after
Leonora and her children left Ferrara, the exiled prince had arrived
there on his way to Pisa, and had been courteously entertained by Duke
Ercole in the Schifanoia Palace. Since then he had spent two dreary
years in exile at Pisa, fretting out his heart in his enforced idleness,
and pi