reputation. Her love for her husband was
the only material passion of her life: when
he was absent she consoled herself by
thought and poetry. And as, during all the
sixteen years of her married life, she was
never again for long together in his company,
she had plenty of time and occasion for the
exercise of her speciality. After his death,
that speciality took a wider range and bolder
flights, and soon all Europe rung with the
name of Vittoria Colonna, the intimate of
Michael Angelo, and the friend and
correspondent of all the celebrated men of the
day. Since Sappho's time, no woman has
earned such a poetic reputation as Vittoria
Colonna: and few women have passed
through life with a fame so unsullied and a
fame as pure as hers. Beautiful, young,
celebrated, and a widow, she went on her
way without a stain falling on her: suspicion
never dared to lift its eyes to her pure face,
and slander forgot to fling its poisoned darts
when she was by. Imaginative, rather than
passionate, and sentimental rather than
fervid, she was one of the true Platonists of
the time, a Petrarchist, bemoaning her dead
cavalry captain in rhymes almost as sweet
and to the full as fanciful, as the great
master whom she delighted to imitate. She
was a perfect specimen of the Italian literary
woman of the day, and Mr. Trollope, whose
book we are endeavouring to condense into
our small pages, was right in placing her side
by side with Catherine Sforza, the woman
of action, and the embodiment of Italian
politics, and in the section immediately
preceding Tullia d'Aragona, the literary petite
maîtresse: also of true Italian growth.

An arrant coquette was this Tullia
d'Aragona: as indeed she could scarce fail
to be, seeing whence came the mystery of
her life—from the unlawful loves of Giulia
of Ferrara, the Laïs of her time, and Pietro
Tagliavia d'Aragona, then a simple priest,
but afterwards Archbishop of Palermo.
Tullia inherited richly from both her parents.
Her mother gave her the beauty, the passion,
the unlicensed thought, the hot blood, the
daring immorality, which marked her own
life; and her father the wit and learning,
the courtly bearing, the scholastic subtlety,
and the high-bred accomplishments, which
made him one of the most noted of the
whole Cardinal crew. And Tullia improved
on her inheritance. One of the most celebrated
of the poetesses then extant, and one
of the most beautiful of the ladies light o'
love who ruled the Pontiff's court and the
Cardinals' council chamber, she added to the
paternal characteristics of either side, the
still further likeness of falling into devotion
and mass-going as she fell into wrinkles and
decay; churchman-like, forbidding cakes and
ale to all the world as soon as her own
junketings were over. Tullia d'Aragona, the
protégée of the banker Strozzi, and a score
more such Don Juans, the loudest laugher at
the broadest joke, and the boldest jester on
unseemly themes—Tullia d'Aragona, when
her lovers grew scarce and her hair turned
grey, took up morality and modesty as a
diversion of powers. For variety's sake, she
made herself the patroness of the saints, and
the enemy of Boccaccio, at whose abominable
name she wishes all honest people to stop
their ears, and sign themselves with the sign
of the Holy Cross. So she spent the last
days of her life, in the company of all sorts
of virtuous and godly folks; and died, when
full of years and sanctity, the very model of
a reformed rake,—the Christian and Catholic
Laïs of the Renaissance.

A far different person was Olympia Morata,
the daughter of old book-worm Morato, the
friend of heresy, and that Curione who,
one day, stripped the high altar of its
trappings, and installed the Bible in their stead.
Born in Ferrara, in the year fifteen hundred
and twenty-six, just at the close of the sway
of Alphonse d'Este, who married Lucrezia
Borgia, and, from a nameless infamy
transformed her to a saint, Olympia was early
trained to classic learning and courtly bearing.
For Hercules, Alphonso's successor and
eldest son, who had married pale, plain Renée,
daughter of Louis the Twelfth of France,
wanted a companion in study for his little
daughter Anna; and who so fit as the old
scholar's beautiful and learned child, the
Tenth Muse, as poets called her in good
terza rima?  It was to a not very harmonious
household that young Olympia was admitted.
Duchess Renée, who had long been tepidly
suspected of holding doctrines which Holy
Church maintained to be utterly corrupt and
damnable, had now openly displayed her
backsliding. Calvin himself, the arch enemy
of the tiara and all that it crowned, was
discovered in her apartments, disguised under
the name and state of Monsieur Charles
d'Espeville; and from thenceforth Renée was
"marked as infected," and her life reduced
to little beyond a state of imprisonment, with
worse than a state prison frowning gloomily
beyond.

Morata was not suspected of having
heretical tendencies, else assuredly no such
place as companion to the Princess Anna
would have been given to his child: for
Hercules was strict as to orthodoxy, however
lax in other matters, and had a wholesome
horror of the length of the Holy Father's
arm. What his duchess, plain, pale Renée,
knew, is quite another matter. However
Olympia was tolerably indifferent to all the
theological subjects under discussion, and
cared only to improve herself in her classical
studies, to give lectures in Greek and Latin
on the various difficulties and characteristics
of her authors, and to imbue and penetrate
her mind so entirely with scholastic subtleties
and classic erudition, as to become literally
more Greek than Italian, more pagan than
Christian. We may fancy the bright time