Charming descriptions are extant of the evenings which this egregious lady spent in conversation with poets and scholars, listening to music, and working on the lovely embroidery for which she was so celebrated. On the third of July 1515, she presented her lord with a daughter. The same year she was grieved by the death of her friend, the great printer, Messer Aldo Manuzio. That cool-headed, shrewd, and very learned Venetian, the hereditary enemy of Ferrara, has left laudations of the Duchess Lucrezia which are sincere and unsurpassable. It is not singular that the great and good among her intimate contemporaries should be those who praise her; and that her defamers should be professional squibbers, notoriously base and venal. The following year, the eleventh of July, 1516, she suffered the loss of her little son who was of the age of five years. Is the touching letter, by which she conveyed the news to her confidante and sister-in-law, the Marchioness Isabella Gonzaga of Mantua, the letter of a wicked woman or of a good? She says, “——the Most Illustrious Don Alessandro, my youngest son, after a long and painful illness, in which remedies were of no avail, was seized by a cruel dysentery. Yesterday, at the fourth hour of the night, (say, midnight,) the poor little man (_poverino_) yielded his blessed soul into the hands of our Lord God, leaving me much afflicted and full of sorrow; as Your Excellency, being a woman and a tender mother yourself, may easily believe.[97]” On the Festival of All Saints, she bore another son to Duke Alfonso, who was baptized by the name Francesco. * * * * * On the twenty-sixth of November 1517, there died in Rome Madonna Giovanna de’ Catanei, the mother of the Duchess Lucrezia; and was buried in Santa Maria _del Popolo_ by the Flaminian Gate. Nine of her letters to her daughter, and rather crabbed letters too, are preserved in the Archives of Modena. They are subscribed, “_La felice ed infelice madre_;” which seems precisely to describe her condition. She was a happy mother; happy in the gorgeous loveliness of her children, happy in their good fortune, happy in being the mother of two dukes, a prince duke, and a sovereign duchess: but unhappy, in that human law made their father not her husband. Another letter of hers, dated from Rome the fifteenth of December 1515, and signed “Perpetua Oratrice Vanozza,” has been the means of causing some uncertainty as to her real name. The following is suggested as an explanation. “Vanozza”, of course, is a familiar abbreviation of “Giovanozza”, which is equivalent to “Big Jenny”. Italians are deliciously disrespectfully inoffensive in their use of universal and personal nicknames; which are taken conferred without the least aggrievance. “Perpetua Oratrice[98]” is not a name at all: but a quasi-official style.