o 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,