The lofty pretensions of the Bishop of Rome, which our poetess, with all her reforming aspirations, goes out of her way to declare and maintain in the phrase of the above sonnet marked by Italics, were dear to the hearts of Italians. It may be, that an antagonistic bias, arising from feelings equally beyond the limits of the religious question, helped to add acrimony to the attacks of the transalpine reformers. But there can be no doubt, that Italian self-love was active in rendering distasteful to Italians a doctrine, whose effect would be to pull down Rome from her position as capital of the Christian world, and no longer permit an Italian eclesiastic to issue his lofty decrees "Urbi et Orbi." And those best acquainted with the Italian mind of that period, as evidenced by its literature, and illustrated by its still-existing tendencies and prejudices, will most appreciate the extent to which such feelings unquestionably operated in preventing the reformation from taking root, and bearing fruit in Italy. The readers of the foregoing sonnets, even those who are familiar with the language of the original, will probably have wondered at the greatness of the poetical reputation, which was built out of such materials. It is but fair, however, to the poetess to state, that the citations have been selected, rather with the view of decisively proving these Protestant leanings of Vittoria, which have been so eagerly denied, and of illustrating the tone of Italian Protestant feeling at that period, than of presenting the most favourable specimens of her poetry. However fitly devotional feeling may be clothed in poetry of the highest order, controversial divinity is not a happy subject for verse. And Vittoria, on the comparatively rare occasions, when she permits herself to escape from the consideration of disputed dogma, can make a nearer approach to true poetry of thought and expression. In the following sonnet, it is curious to observe how the expression of the grand and simple sentiment of perfect trust in the will and intentions of the omnipotent Creator, which, in the first eight lines, rises into something like poetry, becomes flattened and debased into the most prosaic doggrel, as soon as the author, recollecting the controversies raging round her on the subject, bethinks her of the necessity of duly defining the theological virtue of "Faith," as being of that sort fit for the production of works.