With most, if not all of these, Vittoria was connected by the bonds of intimate friendship. With Contarini, Sadoleto, and Pole, especially, she corresponded; and the esteem felt for her by such men is the most undeniable testimony to the genuine worth of her character. It is easy to imagine, therefore, how warm a reception awaited her arrival on this occasion in Rome, and how delightful must have been her stay there. She had now reached the full measure of her reputation. The religious and doctrinal topics which were now occupying the best minds in Italy, and on which her thoughts were frequently busied in her correspondence with such men as those named above, had recently begun to form the subject-matter of her poems. And their superiority in vigour and earnestness to her earlier works must have been perfectly apparent to her reverend and learned friends. [Sidenote: TO FERRARA.] Accordingly we are told that her stay in Rome on this occasion was a continued ovation; and Signor Visconti informs us, on the authority of the Neapolitan historian Gregorio Rosso, that Charles V. being then in Rome "condescended to visit in their own house the ladies Giovanna di Aragona, wife of Ascanio Colonna, and Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa di Pescara." The following year, 1537 that is, she went, Visconti says, to Lucca, from which city she passed to Ferrara, arriving there on the 8th of April "in humble guise, with six waiting women only."[189] Ercole d'Este, the second of the name, was then the reigning duke, having succeeded to his father Alphonso in 1534. And the court of Ferrara, which had been for several years preeminent among the principalities of Italy for its love of literature and its patronage of literary men, became yet more notably so in consequence of the marriage of Hercules II. with Renée of France, the daughter of Louis XII. The Protestant tendencies and sympathies of this Princess had rendered Ferrara also the resort, and in some instances the refuge, of many professors and favourers of the new ideas which were beginning to stir the mind of Italy. And though Vittoria's orthodox Catholic biographers are above all things anxious to clear her from all suspicion of having ever held opinions eventually condemned by the Church, there is every reason to believe that her journey to Ferrara was prompted by the wish to exchange ideas upon these subjects with some of those leading minds which were known to have imbibed Protestant tendencies, if not to have acquired fully formed Protestant convictions. It is abundantly clear, from the character of her friendships, from her correspondence, and from the tone of her poetry at this period, and during the remainder of her life, that her mind was absorbingly occupied with topics of this nature. And the short examination of the latter division of her works, which it is proposed to attempt in the next chapter, will probably convince such as have no partisan Catholic feelings on the subject,