, once severed from her husband by murder, and
soiled, whether justly or not, by atrocious rumors, to which her
father's and her brother's conduct gave but too much color. She proved a
model princess after all, and died at last in childbirth, after having
been praised by Ariosto as a second Lucrece, brighter for her virtues
than the star of regal Rome.

[1] Her dowry was 300,000 ducats, besides wedding presents, and
certain important immunities and privileges granted to Ferrara
by the Pope.

History has at last done justice to the memory of this woman, whose long
yellow hair was so beautiful, and whose character was so colorless. The
legend which made her a poison-brewing Maenad has been proved a lie--but
only at the expense of the whole society in which she lived. The simple
northern folk, familiar with the tales of Chriemhild, Brynhild, and
Gudrun, who helped to forge this legend, could not understand that a
woman should be irresponsible for all the crimes and scandals
perpetrated in her name. Yet it seems now clear enough that not hers,
but her father's and her brother's, were the atrocities which made her
married life in Rome a byword. She sat and smiled through all the
tempests which tossed her to and fro, until she found at last a fair
port in the Duchy of Ferrara. Nursed in the corruption of Papal Rome,
which Lorenzo de' Medici described to his son Giovanni as 'a sink of all
the vices,' consorting habitually with her father's concubines, and
conscious that her own mother had been married for show to two
successive husbands, it is not possible that Lucrezia ruled her conduct
at any time with propriety. It is even probable that the darkest tales
about her are true. The Lord of Pesaro, we must remember, told his
kinsman, the Duke of Milan, that the assigned reasons for his divorce
were false, and that the fact was what can scarcely be recorded.[1]
Still, there is no ground for supposing that, in the matter of her
first husband's divorce and the second's murder, she was more than a
passive agent in the hands of Alexander and Cesare. The pleasure-loving,
careless woman of the Renaissance is very different from the Medea of
Victor Hugo's romance; and what remains most revolting to the modern
conscience in her conduct is complacent acquiescence in scenes of
debauchery devised for her amusement.[2] Instead of viewing her with
dread as a potent and malignant witch, we have to regard her with
contempt as a fe