a prophetic
note of warning in his last accents--"While I am singing, I see all
Italy set on fire by these Gauls, coming to ravage I know not how many
fresh lands, alas!"

In this city which was at once the home of Italian epic and Italian
drama, at this court where the boy Ariosto was to take up the song that
dropped from the lips of Boiardo, and to wear the laurel in his turn,
the young princesses of Este grew up. There were three of them, for
Lucrezia, the duke's illegitimate daughter, had found a kind mother in
the duchess, and was brought up with her young step-sisters Isabella and
Beatrice, until in 1487, she became the wife of Annibale Bentivoglio,
and went to live in Bologna. Under Leonora's careful and vigilant eyes,
these maidens were trained in all the culture of the day. Their
classical studies were directed by Battista Guarino, the son of the
learned Verona humanist, the same who begged the Marquis of Mantua for a
grant of wheat that he might the better be able to teach his betrothed
bride Madonna Isabella during the famine at Ferrara. With him they
learnt sufficient Latin to read Cicero and Virgil, as well as Greek and
Roman history. Music and dancing were taught them almost from infancy.
They learnt to play the viol and lute, and sang _canzoni_ and sonnets to
the accompaniment of these instruments. Beatrice, we know, was
passionately fond of music. She employed the great Pavian Lorenzo
Gusnasco to make her clavichords and viols of the finest order, and like
her father, she never travelled without her favourite singers. Isabella
herself had a beautiful voice, and sang with a sweetness and grace which
charmed all hearers. The most accomplished poets of the Renaissance,
Pietro Bembo and Niccolo da Correggio, Girolamo Casio and Antonio
Tebaldeo, were proud to hear her sing their verses, and the Vicenza
scholar Trissino, forestalling Waller in this, wrote a _canzone_
addressed to "My Lady Isabella playing the lute."

Messer Ambrogio da Urbino began to give Isabella dancing lessons almost
as soon as she could walk. Later on a certain Messer Lorenzo Lavagnolo,
who had taught Elizabeth and Maddalena Gonzaga, the young sisters of the
Marquis of Mantua, and had afterwards been sent to the court of Milan to
teach Duchess Bona's daughters, came to Ferrara. This master, who was
commended to the Duchess of Milan by the Marchioness Barbara of Mantua
as superior to all other professors of the art of dancing, gave lesso