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dispute between them. The investiture of Ferrara was to be renewed and confirmed; all claim of the Apostolic See to Modena, Reggio, &c., was to be abandoned; Ippolito the Duke's second son was to have a Cardinal's hat and the bishopric of Modena; and Alphonso was to make as much salt at Comacchio as he pleased.

But hardly was the treaty signed before the Pope escaped from St. Angelo to Orvieto, and thereupon unblushingly refused to perform any one of the promises made. And Alphonso, who had incurred great risk of the Emperor's displeasure by performing his share of the bargain, had to turn about with all possible speed, break with the King of France, and hope by humble excuses to be able to make it up again with Charles.

Thus in Ferrara, as indeed throughout Italy, things were very different from what they had been during the latter half of the fifteenth century. Men might with some show of reason talk of the good old times, and look out on those around them with misgiving and despondency. And yet the Phoenix was burning herself as usual; only, as must be admitted, with more than ordinary amount of pestilential stench and stifling smoke,-smoke so stifling, so pestilential, that but few of those, who had to draw their life-breath, as best they might, in the midst of it, attained to any remotest guess that all this so sulphureous smother, and confused darkness of the air, was in truth but caused by that Phoenix burning, and preparatory for a purer atmosphere when it was accomplished. Few in any age can gain such Pisgah-glimpse of the coming time; fewest in that of which this writing

treats.

THE WORLD IN HER DAY.

53

But of those few our Olympia, as it is hoped the reader will see reason to believe, was one. Yet that terrible burning time,—such a Phoenix burning as the world has once and once only seen since-was but on the eve of beginning in the scene on which Olympia had to appear, at the time of her appearance. Her mortal career had to be passed in the midst of the very densest smoke-clouds of the funeral pyre.

Easy for us, looking back over the traversed maze. with chart in hand, to understand the plan of it! Easy enough to talk of renaissance and glorious morning-tide spring of human thought! To those in the thick of the sweltering struggle, it was as the eve of dissolution and universal cataclysm.

CHAPTER II.

Troublous new times in Ferrara. How a French King's daughter became a Duchess-Bygones were aught but bygones-and Mitre and Cowl were lords of all.

PREVIOUSLY to this celebrated era of "renaissance," all the business of education, such as it was, had necessarily been in the hands of the clergy. But the wellknown circumstances which at the beginning of the sixteenth century led to a new zeal for the study of the languages of ancient Greece and Rome, led also to the creation of a totally new class of teachers. The most eminent professors of the new learning were men, whose position made it necessary that their acquirements should be made a means of gaining a livelihood. And they became therefore for the most part professional teachers. They were also generally laymen. A body of lay pedagogues was a new thing in the world; and surely one of no small significance. For though these men professed simply to give instruction in the Greek or in the Latin tongue and literature, not to educate their pupils, yet the mass of idea, unstamped by the ecclesiastical mint, which was necessarily thus circulated, must have exercised an influence, which has perhaps not been estimated at its worth, in inquiries into the causes of the mental tendencies of that period.

PEREGRINO MORATO.

55

Among the number of learned laymen, thus independently exercising the profession of teacher, we find a certain Peregrino or Pellegrino Morato, a native of Mantua, established at Ferrara early in the sixteenth century. He had, we are told, many of the nobility of Ferrara for his pupils; and had already acquired considerable reputation by his teaching in several cities of Italy.* All that has reached us concerning him concurs to produce the impression that Morato must have been an estimable and worthy man; among which testimonies may perhaps be reckoned the fact of his continued poverty, notwithstanding his success as a teacher, and the lofty position of some among his pupils.

The most noted scholars and teachers of that age would seem to have led almost invariably wandering lives. They are heard of now holding a chair in one university and now in another, or attached to several of the princely houses of Italy in succession. And such appears to have been the early life of Morato. But at Ferrara he fixed himself more permanently, and soon anchored himself there in a manner, which made “La gran Donna del Po," as Tassoni calls that city, his home, and the centre of all this world's joys and sorrows for the remainder of his life. There he married, and became the father of five children, of whom Olympia appears to have been the eldest. There also he formed close and durable friendships with most of the learned men, of whom a remarkable band were gathered together in the court and university of Ferrara.

Among these, one of the most notable for his varied

*C. Secundi Curionis Epist., lib..

acquirements as well as for the closeness of his intimacy with Morato, was Celio Calcagnini, who occupied the chair of "belle lettere" in the university of his native city. Antiquarian, mathematician, astronomer, poet, scholar, and critic, Calcagnini was one of the most encyclopædic men in an age, when students still dreamed of mastering the "omne scibile." The numerous letters printed among his works prove his friendship with Morato to have been of the most intimate kind. And, if these letters had fortunately preserved their dates, instead of being printed in a confused mass, we should have had the means of ascertaining much more accurately than is now possible, the leading events of his friend Morato's life.

Alexander Guarini the grammarian, professor in the university and secretary to the Duke; Giglio Gregorio Giraldi, one of the most eminent Greek scholars of his day, a man of vast erudition and the first writer of any value on the ancient mythology; Bartolomeo Ricci, the learned but amusingly vain-glorious and quarrelsome scholar and critic, whose comedy in Italian prose entitled "the Nurses" is reckoned by Quadrio among the best in the language, and who was brought to Ferrara in 1539, on the recommendation of Calcagnini, to be tutor to Duke Hercules' son Alphonso, then six years old; the two brothers Chilian and John Sinapi, Germans, who occupied the chairs of Greek and Medicine in the University of Ferrara, of whom the former was Olympia's master, and was regarded by her as a second father; and lastly, but bound to Morato and his family by a more intimate and closer friendship than any of the others enumerated, Celio Secondo Curione,-all these, with others of similar tastes and pursuits formed a society, which rendered

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