After the steed is stolen, we shut the stable-door; and the Duchess, who now felt very cowardly after dark, set a regular watch on the battlements, whose orders were that he should wind his horn every hour, as he paced his rounds, that she might be certified he was on the alert. The prolonged, wailing note of this horn, piercing the solemn stillness of night, had something infinitely melancholy in it, and often woke her with a start; but then she had the satisfaction of thinking all was safe, and soon yielded herself again to soft repose. Her maids, of whom she had as many as the Duchess in Don Quixote, were much more timorous than she was, and yielded a good deal to their fears, thinking it rather pretty and On the first rumour of Barbarossa's invasion, Donna Caterina had swept off all these young people into the cellar, and there locked them and herself in, while Caterina, the nurse, devoted herself to securing the jewels and plate, which she did with complete success. Sebastian del Piombo made many studies of the Duchess before he could please himself; and the irresolution with which captious cavillers have chosen to charge him was indicated in the deliberation with which he poised and valued the merits of each before his final decision was made. But deliberation After sketching her, then, as a nymph, an angel, a goddess, he chose the simplest of his studies: one that represented her as "A creature not too bright or good For human nature's daily food; But yet an angel, too, and bright With something of celestial light:" and then, to it he set con furore, grasping palette and brushes as Jove might his thunder-bolts, and painting up his study with consummate art and science, often in dead silence only broken by "A little more to the right." As for the Duchess, when she was off duty, that is, when Sebastian was getting his picture O, delightful art of painting! Who can pursue you and not be happy? Those artists who have known envy, jealousy, and malice, have not loved you for yourself, but for ends far below you; for you are infinitely calming! The true painter knows no rivalry but with nature, no master but truth, no mistress but purity, no reward but success. As Garibaldi, king of men, said last year, "When God puts you in the way of doing a good thing, do it, and hold your tongue." "Do you think," said Giulia, one day, "I "Certainly, if you gave your mind to it. But you never will! You are too rich to be a good painter. A certain degree of excellence you may attain, that will embellish your life and charm your leisure; but, to become really great, one must attack painting like any mechanical trade, and apply to it like an apprentice, not merely when the fancy inclines, but at all times, willing or unwilling." "Ah, that would never suit me," said the Duchess. "But, supposing I could leap over the apprenticeship, and become at once a great artist like Michael Angelo, I might have underlings to do all the rough work for me, and only do what was pleasant." "That is not Michael Angelo's way at all," said Sebastian. "He grinds his own colours, Sebastian little thought art would ever make a retrograde progress to pre-Raffaelitism. Do we then, after all, move in a circle? In a month, the picture was finished. It was curious that Giulia should have sat for it, at Ippolito's request, and for Ippolito; but we When the Cardinal saw the picture, it gave him a strange mixture of pleasure and pain. "You have doubtless had a pleasant month," said he, moodily. "I wish you had been Ippolito and I Sebastian." And when he found that Sebastian had promised Giulia his own picture, he begged him to introduce his portrait into it—which he did. "Ippolito had, at all events," says one of his chroniclers, "some loveable and estimable qualities, and most of the historians have a One morning, when it was discovered that many valuable statues in Rome had been broken and defaced during the night, the Pope was so incensed at it that he gave orders that whoever had committed the outrage, unless it should prove to be Cardinal Ippolito, should be hanged. This looks as if he were not quite sure that Ippolito might not be the A Cardinal who could even be suspected by a Pope of playing such a prank must have been a sorry sort of a churchman; and though we read of "his frank, chivalrous nature," it would be vain indeed to look for anything like spirituality in a Medici. When Giulia asked him for something to supply the vague longings of her heart for a higher happiness than this world could give, he was quite at sea, and could direct her to nothing but ascetic observances and the sacrifice of all her possessions to the church, whose coffers he so recklessly emptied. Yet he had a nature capable of better things; but it could not shake itself free from the trammels of earth. When he looked at Giulia's picture he thought, "There, is a woman who might have made me happy." Perhaps he Of course there were many versions of the story of Barbarossa's attempt to capture the Duchess. Affo, the family annalist, summons all his sesquipedalian vocabulary to dignify the occurrence with such eloquence as this—"Quali fosseri gli affetti del suo delicatissimo animo in cotal fuga, degno argomento di poema! e di storia, gioverÀ per interrompimento di questo basso mio stile, di alzarsi a tanto incapace," &c., &c. And Muzio Giustinapolitano indited an eclogue on the subject, beginning— "Muse! quali antri o qual riposte selve Vi teneano in quel punto? e tu, Minerva! Qual sacri studj? E qual nuova vaghezza Il dolce Amor?" &c., &c. "What were you all about, ye muses, goddesses, It was not only declared that Barbarossa had been despatched by the Sultan, who desired to enumerate her among the beauties of his harem, but that she had flung herself out of window, in her chemise, and fled barefooted to the mountains, where she fell into the hands of some condottieri, who, recognising her, respectfully conducted her back to her castle. Giulia was very angry when these stories reached her, which she was the last, however, to hear of; and when it was learnt that she was contradicting them with warmth, another and worse story was circulated, that she had had a Moorish slave assassinated for having told the truth; in proof of which, his dead body had been cast ashore with his tongue cut out. When Giulia begged her kinsmen to refute these calumnies, they only pooh-poohed them, Extremely weary of herself and of things in general, she one morning languidly opened a letter from her cousin, the Marchioness of Pescara, with very little expectation of its affording her much interest or amusement. "Vittoria is always a flight above me," she mentally said. "I never was, and never shall be, one of your grand intellectual ladies." This was said with that species of contempt with which too many of us imply, "Your grand intellectual ladies are great stupids, after all"—but are they so? Have they not often the best of it, even in this world? Appreciation and applause that we real stupids would be very glad of, fall to the share of the working bees that make the honey, and have not Thus wrote "the divine Vittoria," as she was frequently called—not in the sense of her being a doctor of divinity, but addicted to divine things:—
"Truly," exclaimed the Duchess, "to be at Naples would be ten thousand times better than to remain here, where the malaria certainly affects me; and I am sure my dear Duke would have said so, were it only for fear of Barbarossa." So she gave the word of command, to the immense joy of her ladies, and, after a prodigious bustle of preparation, she started with quite a little army of retainers—six ladies of honour in sky-blue damask, six grooms in chocolate and blue, her maggior-domo in starched ruff and black velvet, and a competent number of men armed to the teeth. She performed the journey, no very long one, in a horse-litter, curtained with blue and silver, and piled with blue satin mattresses; and when she wished to change her position she mounted her white palfrey. |