Such was Vittoria Colonna. It has been seen what her husband Pescara was. And the question arises,—how far can it be imagined possible that she should not only have lavished on him to the last while living, all the treasures of an almost idolatrous affection; not only have looked back on his memory after his death with fondness and charitable, even blindly charitable, indulgence; but should absolutely have so canonised him in her imagination as to have doubted of her own fitness to consort hereafter with a soul so holy! It may be said, that Vittoria did not know her husband as we know him; that the few years they had passed together had no doubt shown her only the better phases of his character. But she knew that he had at least doubted whether he should not be false to his sovereign, and had been most infamously so to his accomplices or dupes. She knew at least all that Giovio's narrative could tell her; for the bishop presented it to her, and received a sonnet in return. But it is one of the most beautiful properties of woman's nature, some men say, that their love has power to blind their judgment. Novelists and poets are fond of representing women whose affections remain unalterably fixed on their object, despite the manifest unworthiness of it; and set such examples before us, as something high, noble, admirable, "beautiful;" to the considerable demoralisation of their confiding students of either sex. There _is_ a tendency in woman to refuse at all risks the dethroning of the sovereign she has placed on her heart's throne. The pain of deposing him is so great, that she is tempted to abase her own soul to escape it; for it is only at that cost that it can be escaped. And the spectacle of a fine nature "dragged down to sympathise with clay," is not "beautiful," but exceedingly the reverse. Men do not usually set forth as worthy of admiration—though a certain school of writers do even this, in the trash talked of love at first sight—that kind of love between the sexes, which arises from causes wholly independent of the higher part of our nature. Yet it is that love alone which can survive esteem. And it is highly important to the destinies of woman, that she should understand and be thoroughly persuaded, that she cannot love that which does not merit love, without degrading her own nature; that under whatsoever circumstances love should cease when respect, approbation, and esteem have come to an end; and that those who find poetry and beauty in the love which no moral change in its object can kill, are simply teaching her to attribute a fatally debasing supremacy to those lower instincts of our nature, on whose due subordination to the diviner portion of our being all nobleness, all moral purity and spiritual progress depends. [Sidenote: POETICAL PLATONISM.]