tion to Peter's Pence that year!

If Lucrezia was somewhat less fair and less clever than Maria, she was,
all the same, an attractive girl. Thin in figure--as all growing
girls--tall, well-formed, with the promise of a well-proportioned
maturity, she had an oval face and a high forehead, well-clustered with
curly auburn hair. There was a peculiarity about her eyes--black they
were or a very dark brown--they had something of that cast of optic
vision which was remarkable in Cosimo, "_Il Padre della Patria_" and in
Lorenzo, "_Il Magnifico_," as well as in other members of the family.

"She had a pretty mouth and a dimpled chin, and always wore a pleasing
expression indicative of good-nature and resolute affection. Very unlike
her elder sisters, Maria and Isabella, she was somewhat reserved in
manner; she spoke little, but expressed her opinion with flashes of her
eyes." Her father admired her firmness of resolution greatly, and
generally spoke of her as "_La Mia Sodana_," "my little strong-willed
daughter."

"She is quite a chip of the old block," he was wont to say of her,
"quite one of us--a Medico in frocks!" Lucrezia shared the lessons of
her brother, and had been brought up specially with the idea of a
brilliant foreign marriage, and her maid was a girl from Modena who knew
Ferrara well.

One condition of the marriage-contract was most unusual--namely, that
the bridegroom should be free to leave Florence upon the third day after
the nuptials had been celebrated! This was necessary, the Prince
averred, in order that he might keep an appointment he had made, with
his father's consent, with the King of France--the enemy of the
quadruple alliance!

Prince Alfonso troubled himself very little about his fiancee. He was
devoted to selfish pleasures, and, when his energies were called into
play, they were devoted to the service of arms. His betrothal to Maria
de' Medici, without his consent, her untimely and suspicious death, and
the character Duke Cosimo bore for tyranny, ambition, and greed, were
undoubtedly deterrent to the young man's wish to cultivate another
Medici alliance.

His own father, Duke Ercole, resembled his prospective father-in-law in
many respects. The Estensi, with the Malatesti of Rimini and Pesaro, the
Sforzai of Milan, and the Medici of Florence, were classed as "families
of tyrants." Duke Ercole was a man of strong will and forceful action--a
tyrant in his own family and cruel to his unhappy co