Anna, the eldest of the three sisters above named, in 1548 was married to the celebrated Francis, duke of Guise, and, after his decease, to James of Savoy, duke of Nemours. Lucretia, some years later than Tasso's arrival at her brother's court, was married to the prince of Urbino, only fifteen years old, when she herself was thirty-seven. This was one of those state alliances which so little resemble treaties of peace, that they deserve to be branded as treaties of discord, in which royal and noble parents sacrifice their children, if not to Moloch, at least to Mammon--nay, too often to both,--for purposes of family aggrandisement, by adding territory to territory, and confounding blood with blood. On the occasion of these unhappy nuptials, Tasso, "as in duty bound," wrote an epithalamium, which had, in its predictions of felicity, the equivocal qualification for excelling in that kind of poetry which Waller, with experienced adroitness, hinted to Charles II., when rallied by his majesty on having composed a far finer panegyric on Cromwell than on himself--the qualification of fiction; for scarcely had the ill-paired couple had time to fall out, when the gallant prince left his bride to volunteer in a crusade against the Turks, with whom everlasting warfare, in every petty form of hostility, was wont to be carried on by the states of Italy. The union ultimately was dissolved, without the intervention of death; and Lucretia, as duchess of Urbino, returned to Ferrara. For many years afterwards, she was, more openly than either her brother or her younger sister, the patron of Tasso, and to her are some of his most graceful lyrics addressed.