CHAPTER III.

How shall a Pope be saved? with the answer thereto.-How shall our Olympia be saved? To be taken into consideration in a subse quent 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 under

standing 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

All

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. hope and project of reform had to be abandoned before the too-evident incompatibility of the fundamental sine-quâ-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

RENÉE'S TROUBLES.

81

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; "* 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." 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,

* Frizzi, vol. iv. p. 360.

VOL. II.

+Ibid.

G