But it was not the manifestation of these fine qualities which obtained for Olympia that great reputation among her contemporaries which is itself an historical phenomenon of no slight importance. It was not her patience under trial, and constancy in adversity, that caused Europe so to ring with her name that the echo of it has reached these days. Fine and noble things as these are, the world has at no time been so poor in them, as not to have possessed many noteworthy examples of them, which fame has had no time to note. Olympia's reputation was due to her learning, exclusive, be it observed, of any of the affectionate sympathy with which she was regarded by her co–religionists on account of her steady adherence to her religious convictions. For Tiraboschi, Quadrio, and other Romanist writers, while lamenting her heresy, speak as warmly as any of her literary merits. Her fame was the reward of such skilful "perfection in the imitation of Cicero and Plato, that not even Zoilus could pick out a fault in her compositions." Many a scholar of mature age enjoyed the respect of his contemporaries in that century, in virtue of a life spent in obtaining that proficiency of which Olympia was mistress in her teens. And though such an amount of admiration for scholarship must seem strange and excessive to an age which considers similar proficiency in young gentlemen in their teens quite sufficiently rewarded by the presentation of a handsomely bound volume with some school–founder's arms stamped in gold on the side; still it must be borne in mind, that the difficulties overcome by the sixteenth century young lady were of a very far more formidable kind, than those, which lie in the way of the nineteenth century young gentleman. Corrupt texts, and scarcity of them, inexperienced and but partially competent teachers, unsettled and very little understood principles of exegesis and criticism, the absence of all that luxury of philological apparatus, which waits on the modern scholar, made the path of the medieval explorers into the jungle of the ancient literature, a very different thing from that of the traveller along its roads, cleared and embellished by the assiduous labour of three hundred years.