The election of the Lord Leo P.P. X was an immense relief to the Duke and Duchess of Ferrara. It meant deliverance from unscrupulous persecution for the Pope’s Holiness now was patrician, and at least a gentleman, though no enemy to the House of Borgia. So Ferrara and Borgia went in peace. The duchy had been at war for nearly six years, almost without cessation; her resources were quite exhausted; her exchequer was empty. So keen was the distress, that, in order not to add to his people’s burden by pressing for his revenues, Duke Alfonso pawned his plate, and Duchess Lucrezia her jewels which were of enormous value. These were redeemed three years later: and it is to the inventory, made when they were pawned, that modern knowledge of their extraordinary rarity and worth is due. * * * * * On the thirteenth of September 1513 was born in Rome, of Don Tarquinio Poplicola di Santacroce and Madonna Ersilia his wife, the Noble Don Prospero Poplicola di Santacroce, afterwards Cardinal-Presbyter of the Title of San Girolamo _degli Schiavoni_ and Nuncio, who introduced Tobacco into Italy and gave it the name _Erba Santacroce_, Holycross Herb. * * * * * The life of the Duchess Lucrezia, during the next few years, was a life of calm after storm, _post tot naufragias tuta_. She won fresh fame by her goodness to young girls, whom she provided with dowries, to tempt them to keep continency by marrying well. Delightfully practical age, which went directly to the point attempting no maudlin half-measures, “so sweetly mawkish and so smoothly dull”! The ideal of the professional philanthropist, then, was to make virtue easy, and vice difficult. The ideal of the professional philanthropist, now, is to make virtue horribly vulgar and vice an imperious necessity. The Duchess Lucrezia had observed that the lack of money is the root of all evil; and, at that root she struck.