These letters, from which a stray fragment of biographical interest has been gathered here and there, are mainly filled with fervent religious exhortations, conceived in a spirit that can leave no doubt of the heartfelt sincerity of the writer. They are for the most part free from any advocacy of the more revolting doctrines of Calvinism, and insist chiefly on the vanity of earthly interests, hopes, and pleasures, and the necessity of God's free grace, to enable us to choose the better path. Those especially to her sister, to Lavinia della Rovere, and to Anna d'Este, are long, urgent, and affectionate exhortations to hold all things nought for Christ's sake. They may be found at length, translated into French, in M. Bonnet's work. But it has seemed to me unnecessary to occupy the present pages with any specimen of these writings, inasmuch as any page of them, divested of the names of persons and places, which mark their authorship, would be absolutely undistinguishable from many millions of pages which have been, and are still being, written and printed on the same subjects. It may be remarked, however, that the manner is more that of the evangelical writers of the nineteenth than of the seventeenth century. It is wholly undisfigured by the undue familiarity, low imagery, and grotesque phraseology, which often marked the efforts of writers determined at any cost to rouse, at least, the attention of their readers, if they could not carry with them their intelligence. As her health declined rapidly, she felt, and frequently expressed, that desire to quit this world and its toils, and to be at rest with God, which is deemed by religionists of the kind called evangelical, to be the most sure and satisfactory indication of a healthy and desirable condition of soul. Thinkers of a different class see only a proof of failing bodily powers in those manifestations, which, to the former, are assurances of increasing spiritual vigour. They find it quite in accordance with all the recognisable operations of the Creator, that in well–regulated minds the desire to live should become weakened, together with the physical incapacity for life; but wholly out of all analogy with His government of the world, that man's highest spiritual excellence should coincide with, or even be compatible with, a diseased condition of the machine, by means of which the spirit has to act and develop itself; and still more, if possible, inconsistent with the ways of God to man, that man's highest state of efficiency for duty should be specially marked by his desire to leave the scene of it.