How shall a Pope be saved? with the answer thereto.—How shall our Olympia be saved? To be taken into consideration in a subsequent chapter.

The eldest child of Hercules and RenÉe was a daughter, Anna, born in 1531. Alphonso, the heir apparent, who succeeded to the Duchy in 1559, was born in 1533. Then came another daughter, Lucrezia, born in 1535, a third named Eleonora, in 1547, and lastly a second son, called Luigi, in 1538. Thus Anna, the eldest, was eight years old at the time of Morato's return to Ferrara; and her education, according to the newest fashion then in vogue, was the chief pre–occupation of the Duchess. The new learning was the fashionable mania of the day in ladies' bower, as in the halls of universities. A delicate taste for the charm of a Ciceronian style was as much necessary to the finished education of a noble lady then, as the graceful carriage of the person in crossing a room or entering a carriage is now. Male blockheadism had not yet suggested to the prudent jealousy of the lords of the creation the discovery, that learning tended to unfit women for the more special duties of wives and mothers. Not to be classical was to be nothing. So Anna d'Este was above all else to be a perfect Latinist and Grecian.

It was in 1540, when she was only nine years old (!) that Calcagnini thus wrote to her, of course in Latin, only to be known from that of the purest Augustan mintage by its greater difficulty and a certain affected intricacy of construction, observable in most of the Latinists of that period:—

"I have read the fables you have translated from the Tuscan into Latin, in an elegant and ornate style, as becomes a royal hand. On finishing the perusal I had only to regret, that it was so soon ended, and that my curiosity was left unsatisfied. I trust that these essays may be the seed of future compositions, which, when matured, will reflect honour on your name. I have already the pleasure of applauding these first steps on the path to fame."

What the very young lady's own composition may have been we have no means of judging; but it must be presumed that she was at all events competent to read readily the letter in which these compliments are addressed to her; and we should now–a–days consider that much for a young lady of nine years, or young gentleman either.

Other translations sent, as it seems, to Celio Curione in the following year, are acknowledged by him in still more flattering and flowery language. And the circumstance is remarkable on other grounds than as a testimony to the Princess Anna's classical proficiency. Curione was at that time, as has been seen, a refugee from ecclesiastical persecution, finding shelter and concealment in the house of Morato. Is it to be supposed that Duke Hercules would have tolerated his daughter's correspondence with one so situated, and that, too, after the unfortunate Calvin discovery? It seems to be but too clear, that Miss Anna and her mamma must have come to the understanding that papa was to know nothing about these literary intimacies with gentlemen under a cloud.

We may be tolerably certain too, that had the Duke known all that his wife knew of Messer Peregrino Morato, he would not have permitted another step, which that lady took about the time of which we are speaking, very soon after the return of Morato,—that is, and in all probability not later than 1540. This was the invitation of Olympia to court, to be the companion of her daughter, and sharer in her studies. RenÉe well knew the power of emulation; and in her eagerness to stimulate the efforts of her daughter, she determined to place beside her one, just five years older than herself, of whose wonderful talents and acquirements all Ferrara was talking.

So in, or very near about, 1540, Olympia left her father's humble home and went to be an inmate of the court, in the dissenting interest, or female side of the house. For dissension and dispute were ever more and more openly manifesting themselves in that splendid dwelling. The Duke and his councillors, lay and ecclesiastical, were becoming from day to day more jealously and suspiciously orthodox; as tidings from all parts of Italy showed that the Church was becoming alive to the dangers which threatened it from the new ideas, and, having once realised this fact, was suddenly convinced of their heretical nature, and determined to exert its utmost power to extinguish them by violence.

Paul III., a politic and worldly wise old man, with considerable desire to do such parts of a Pope's duty as could be accomplished without interfering with his own projects and schemes of ambition, was quite as much minded as any member of the sacred college to preserve intact to Rome its bishops and high priests, the monopoly of those sacerdotal emoluments and perquisites, which sacramental Christianity was contrived to afford in abundance. Pius IX., a better man, as living in better times than Paul III., found himself in front of the same eternal difficulty. All hope and project of reform had to be abandoned before the too–evident incompatibility of the fundamental sine–qu–non condition, that "I transmit to my successors intact the power I have received from my predecessors." Thorough reform on the condition, that nothing shall be changed! Poor Pius! So once again Holy Church had to return to its vomit of St. Angelo and Paliano prisons, arbitrary arrests, immaculate conceptions, winking virgins, and concordats. And mankind finding finally, all hope of curing the cancer vain, has to screw its courage to the truly painful and terrible operation of excision;—as mankind silently and with naturally reluctant procrastination, is even now doing.

Paul III. was as free from persecuting instincts as Pius IX. He had been a man of the world, was the father of children, and had a natural human heart within his bosom. But at his elbow stood one, who was all priest. No merciful weakness, no natural affection, no human sympathy, no shade of misgiving, ever checked John Peter Caraffa in his crusade against free human thought. When Paul was doubtfully deliberating what measures might best be adopted to check the progress of heresy in Italy, Caraffa promptly decided for him, that the Inquisition was the one thing wanted,—the Inquisition with fullest powers of imprisonment, confiscation, and death, and he himself as Chief Inquisitor,—this, by God's help, and that of fire and sword, and nothing else than this, would succeed in victoriously crushing and extirpating hydra–headed heresy. On the 21st of July, 1542, the requisite bull was obtained from Paul III., and Caraffa rushed to his work, with the avidity of an unleashed hound on his prey.

Such signs of the times were not lost upon Duke Hercules, and reproduced themselves in sundry painful forms in the interior of the palace. The Duchess is still found to have about her persons "of very unwholesome smell;"[53] the flock of them have to be overhauled by the Duke's new Jesuit director, Pelletario, and all those found "with the rot upon them" are got rid of. A powerful stream of pure doctrine was turned on upon the infected Duchess, and sacraments were prescribed without much success. The "miserable woman" is found with flesh–meat on her table on a Friday; and the justly exasperated Duke, at his wits' end, has to shut her up in her apartment, with two attendants only, and send her daughters to a convent. "Now, though RenÉe was very astute," writes the historian, "far more so than the Duke and all his counsellors, yet it is not permissible to attribute wholly to her cunning the surprising conversion that was operated in her, immediately after she was shut up."[54] The imprisoned lady, under plainly miraculous influence, sent suddenly for her husband's priest, made a full confession, placed her conscience entirely in his keeping, and asked for the sacrament from his hands. So efficacious a spiritual agent is a little persecution, that astute as the patient was, and temporary as the conversion was proved in the sequel, the historian cannot believe but that some genuine spiritual effect was produced by it.

It at all events had the effect of releasing RenÉe from her durance, and restoring her daughters to her. For the Duke, delighted at the success of his discipline, "admitted her to sup with him that same evening."

But amid all this, in a family so constituted, and living under such conditions, young Olympia must have been placed at times in strange positions, have witnessed some suggestive scenes, and altogether have had offered to her ripening intelligence matter for meditation on many things. As to the disputed points, and antagonistic principles and prejudices, which lay at the root of all these jars and difficulties, she seems to have been at that time effectually preserved against all the dangers of partizanship by thorough indifference to the whole subject. The arrangement by which she had become a resident at the court was to her a subject of unmixed rejoicing and exultation. The household duties which the narrow circumstances of her father's home had imposed upon her, had occasioned many a sigh over the hours thus lost to her beloved studies. Now her whole life was to be devoted under the most favourable circumstances to the prosecution of them. "Henceforward," writes Calcagnini in a letter to her, "you may give yourself up to your favourite pursuits, change the distaff for the pen, house linen for books, and the exercise of the fingers for that of the mind.... It will now be for you to preserve without flaw the good gifts which you have received from your parents—modesty, candour, and virtuous principles, and to add to them wisdom, elegance, high–mindedness, and contempt for all that is base."[55]

She was, moreover, still to be under the tuition of her father in the palace, and was to share with the Princess Anne the Greek lessons of Sinapi.

Several specimens have been preserved of her compositions about this time, which indicate a very remarkable amount of acquirement. Various passages have have been quoted by her biographers with perhaps more of admiration than they merit. They were received by her contemporaries with the most unbounded and hyperbolical applause; and the modern narrators of her career seem to have taken the tone of the high–flown eulogies of these productions which they have found on record. But in reading things of this kind, of Cisalpine production, much allowance must always be made for the prevalent habit of undiscriminating and exaggerated laudation, arising from the ever–present influence of municipal rivalry. The "nul aura de l'esprit, hors nous et nos amis," principle was always at work. To a Ferrara man, Olympia was our Olympia,—"gloria FerrarÆ; patriÆ decus," &c., and was to be made the most of accordingly. But, secondly, still more allowance must be made for the strong tendency of the literary culture of that period in Italy to regard the form rather than the matter. Artistic love for the beauties of language leads the literary world of Italy, even at the present day, to attach an undue measure of importance to diction and style, at the expense of subject–matter. And at the flood–tide of the classical mania of the sixteenth century, correctness of classic phraseology, and perfection of mimicry of the ancients, was the alpha and omega of excellence.

And in these respects the writings of Olympia are truly remarkable. The amount of acquaintance with the classics then most in vogue, the familiarity with their modes of thinking, and the mastery of their language, attained by a girl of from fourteen to sixteen, are really astonishing. Thus we have an essay on Mutius ScÆvola in Greek; a defence of Cicero against some of his detractors; and, more remarkable still, lectures (!) on the paradoxes of that author.

Of the whole picture, such as we are able to realise it, of this bright and beautiful Olympia, ambitious of praise, triumphant, full of fervid poetic enthusiasm, and love of the beautiful, enchanting all eyes, and charming all ears,—approaching, one may fancy, in social position, some Siddons or Mars more nearly than any other existence known to our times; of the whole picture, these public lectures, or declamations, seem to our notions the strangest feature. Let the inmates of our "Establishments," "Colleges," "Academies," of the most finished and "finishing" category, picture to themselves a young lady of sixteen called on to lecture before an audience, composed of all the court circle, and most learned Dons of Ferrara, on the Paradoxes of Cicero!—improvising her declamation, too, in Latin and Greek, if we may believe her friend Curio, writing many years afterwards, with the enthusiastic admiration of these exhibitions still strong within him.

"Then," writes he, "we used to hear her declaiming in Latin, improvising in Greek, explaining the paradoxes of the greatest orators, and answering to all the questions addressed to her."[56]

It is evident that these public performances were considered among the most important and valuable parts of a complete education, from the instructions still extant, which Morato gave in writing to his daughter about the time when she left his roof to reside under that of Duchess RenÉe.

Here are some of the admonitions which a fond and anxious father deemed most important to be impressed on a daughter about to leave her paternal roof for the first time.

"A matron, before leaving her bower, consults her mirror and her favourite maid to know with what look and air she is about to appear in society. The human voice ought to act in like manner. A speaker should use his lips as bridles to his words, raising or lowering his tones, and giving them delicacy or sonority as he opens his lips more or less.

"Virgil, CÆsar, Brutus, Cicero, excelled in the art of elocution. Minerva, Mercury, the Muses, the harmony of the spheres, the chords of the lyre, Apollo, the king of song, echo, which repeats our voices,—are not all these images of the multiplicity of tone of which the human voice is capable? What man does not listen with pleasure to accents pure and harmonious? The guardian of the infernal gate, Cerberus himself, is appeased by them. The wheel of Ixion at the sound of a sweet voice stands still!"

Humph! It does not quite please one!—rings mighty hollow, at least on the Teutonic ear, all this about Minerva, Mercury, Apollo, king of song, and the wheel of Ixion! Was that worthy old sixteenth–century schoolmaster really and truly scooped and hollowed out by perpetual droppings from Helicon into an empty shell resounding classicalities, and mere togaed simulacrum of a Roman of the Augustan age? To the Teutonic imagination, the picture thus far realised of our Olympia, seems to present an altogether scenic personage, prepared for purposes of representation, slender, graceful figure, draped in long white muslin robes, with beautifully eloquent upraised arm, "Andres athenaioi" on her lovely lips, and background of gleaming marble porticoes, and grey–green olive groves behind,—the cloudless blue above, and bluer Egean in the distance! A truly charming picture! And yet this nineteenth century of ours would be sorely puzzled to what good use to put the original, if we had her among us, for any other than mere academic drawing–school purposes.

Not a principal "in any establishment," of howsoever slight "finishing" pretensions, but would at once, on most cursory examination, pronounce our poor Olympia an entire failure as a specimen of female education, a mistake from beginning to end, good only as an example of what should be avoided.

Several of the lectures, or declamations, pronounced by her before the learned world of Ferrara, have been preserved. Here is a specimen of the introductory portion of one of them.[57]

"I well know the rarely equalled benevolence of my audience; yet the timidity natural to my age, joined to the feebleness of my talents, fills me with reasonable alarm. I tremble, and remain voiceless, like the rhetorician who steps up to the altar at Lyons[58]—

"'Ceu Lugdunensem rhetor dicturus ad aram.'

"However, you command, and I will obey; for no sacrifice is more agreeable to God than that of a willing obedience. I submit myself, therefore, to this trial for the third time, like an artist unskilled in his art, who can make nothing of a coarse–grained marble. But if you offer a block of Parian to his chisel, he will no longer deem his work valueless. The beauty of the material will give value to his production. Perhaps it will be so with mine. There are strains so rich in melody and harmony, that even when reproduced by the most miserable instrument, they yet retain all their charm. Such are the words of my favourite author. Listen to them. They will lose nothing of their grace and majesty even in passing from my lips."

Those who were present at those performances thought that the words gained much, on the contrary, in passing from those lips. Nothing seems to have excited the admiration and approbation of her contemporaries more than these public declamations. "One might have fancied that one was listening to one of the learned virgins of Greece or Rome, to whom, indeed, she may be justly compared!"[59] cries one enthusiastic hearer.

"The young girls of thy age," writes another, "pluck spring flowers from the meadows to weave them into many–coloured chaplets. But thou gatherest no flowerets doomed ere long to fade and die, but selectest the immortal amaranths from the abounding gardens of the Muses, whose altogether divine privilege it is never more to wither, but gain beauty from time, and flourish ever more greenly as it passes."[60]

Poor old Giraldi sends her Latin verses from his gout–tormented bed.

"Thou'rt all fair and brightly glowest,
As in years and lore thou growest,
In the Virtue's court, young maid,
Which RenÉe's fair virgins tread,
And the sister Muses nine.
Happy he, whom speech of thine
Warms and gladdens! happier yet
Parents that did thee beget,
And named Olympia! happiest he—
Should fate to man such bliss decree—
Whose bride thou shalt consent to be.
And e'en I, though old 'tis true,
Have my share of pleasure too,
While to soothe my gouty pains
Such a damsel's smile remains."[61]

To all this homage was added the affectionate kindness and liking of the Duchess, Olympia's sovereign and mistress. She had, apparently after she had been at the court about a couple of years, an illness which made it desirable for her to return to her father's house, though it was with difficulty, we are told,[62] that RenÉe could make up her mind to part with her. Her absence was not long, and the following letter from the Greek professor, John Sinapi (he too, be it observed, in passing, "of very unwholesome smell;" so vain were poor Duke Hercules' efforts to keep a purely orthodox household), indicates the high place occupied by Olympia in the favour of the court.

"All here are greatly delighted to know that you are re–established and out of the doctor's hands. Settle at once with your father the day and the manner of your return among us. The Princess has declared that it will be a great pleasure to her to see you again, be it brought about how it may. She places at your disposition the litter in which you were carried to your father's house. Only arrange with your father your return, in whatever manner you may find most agreeable and speediest."

With her companion and fellow–student, the Princess Anne, she lived on terms of the most affectionate intimacy. A durable friendship grew up between them; and a letter written many years afterwards by Olympia to her old playmate, gives a pleasing idea of the sort of companionship which existed between the two young girls.

"You remember," she writes, "how familiarly we lived together, notwithstanding you were my sovereign and liege lady, and for how many years the companionship lasted; how all our studies were in common, and how the pursuit of them continually increased the affection which had grown up between us."

Surely here was enough to "spoil" any young lady in her teens, if homage, flattery, applause, admiration, excited and gratified vanity, had spoiling power!

And Olympia stepped upon the pedestal set for her with all the youthful audacity of conscious genius. They all told her, that she was a tenth muse, and she accepted the part with exulting confidence, that it was in truth that for which kind nature had best fitted her. Hear her own joyous profession of faith, as standing there in the pride and grace of her beauty before a courtly, gay, and learned circle, she mouthed it forth in sonorous Greek verse, harmoniously flowing with the pure young voice amid a burst of enthusiastic applause, the echoes of which have sounded across three hundred years.

Done into homely English the rhymes fall sadly flat. But the meaning may correctly be gathered as thus:[63]

"No joy is still a joy to all mankind,
For Jove hath given to each a different mind!
Castor and Pollux by a different aim,
Though twin–born brothers, seek the path to fame.
And I, though woman, womanly gear have left,
Distaff and threads, and work–basket and weft!
The Muses' haunts, Parnassus' flowery hill,
These have been all my joy, these shall be still.
For other pleasures other maids have sighed,
These are my glory, these my joy and pride."

The hexameters and pentameters are quite as good, and no better, than our English schools, after sufficient years spent in minutely copying from the model, can supply, if need were, in any quantity to order.

Poor Olympia! The highly competent principle of that finishing establishment, to whose experienced judgment we have already had occasion to refer, would arch her awful brows more highly than ever over her gold double eye–glasses, it is to be feared, at these shockingly unfeminine sentiments, t? ?????? ?e?p??," "taken leave of your feminalities"! Miss Morata! If I am rightly informed of your meaning, unhappily it would indeed seem so! A very unfortunately situated young woman! Altogether devoid too of religious principle, as I am told; and as indeed might have been guessed without telling!

Not improbably there may have been ladies too in Ferrara who commented on the young muse much to the same purpose. But Olympia trod her bright path exultingly, scattering poesies and gathering triumphs, serenely indifferent to the justification quarrels, and free–will perplexities which were distracting the world around her, serenely worshipping beauty amid her muse–haunted attic shades in undeniably heathenish and pagan fashion.

Poor Olympia! "Malignant fate sate by and smiled." But some better ruler of the destinies than any malignant fate smiled also. The "Theluka" were after all not left very far behind. They will all be forthcoming in due time, these saucily abused feminalities, at the quickening trumpet–blast of the fairy knight appointed to the adventure of breathing the soul of womanhood into our Undine–like muse.