The result was a papal decree, depriving Cardinal Colonna of his hat; and declaring confiscated all the estates of the family. Deeply grieved by all these excesses, both by the lawless violence of her kinsmen, and by the punishment incurred by them, she left Marino, and once more returned to the retirement of Ischia in the beginning of 1527. It was well for her that she had decided on not remaining in or near Rome during that fatal year. While the eternal city and its neighbourhood were exposed to the untold horrors and atrocities committed by the soldiers of the Most Catholic King, Vittoria was safe in her island home, torn indeed to the heart by the tidings which reached her of the ruin and dispersion of many valued friends, but at least tranquil and secure. [Sidenote: IN MEMORIAM.] And now, if not perhaps while she was still with the nuns of San Silvestro, began her life as a poetess. She had hitherto written but little, and occasionally only. Henceforward, poetical composition seems to have made the great occupation of her life. Visconti, the latest, and by far the best editor of her works, has divided them into two portions. With two or three unimportant exceptions, of which the letter to her husband already noticed is the most considerable, they consist entirely of sonnets. The first of Signor Visconti's divisions, comprising 134 sonnets, includes those inspired almost entirely by her grief for the loss of her husband. They form a nearly uninterrupted series "In Memoriam," in which the changes are rung with infinite ingenuity on a very limited number of ideas, all turning on the glory and high qualities of him whom she had lost, and her own undiminished and hopeless misery. "I only write to vent that inward pain, On which my heart doth feed itself, nor wills Aught other nourishment," begins the first of these elegiac sonnets; in which she goes on to disclaim any idea of increasing her husband's glory,—"non per giunger lume al mio bel sole;" which is the phrase she uses invariably to designate him. This fancy of alluding to Pescara always by the same not very happily chosen metaphor, contributes an additional element of monotony to verses still further deprived of variety by the identity of their highly artificial form. This form, it is hardly necessary to remark, more than any other mode of the lyre, needs and exhibits the beauties of accurate finish and neat polish. Shut out, as it is, by its exceeding artificiality and difficult construction from many of the higher beauties of more spontaneous poetical utterance, the sonnet, "totus, teres atque rotundus," is nothing if not elaborated to gem-like perfection. Yet Vittoria writes as follows:—