Yet how closely within call the while was all that is most valuable and womanly in woman! How promptly it was all forthcoming at the first touch of softening sorrow, or the first awakening thrill of maidenly love—those master agents in completing and perfecting woman's moral nature! Did Olympia's learning make her a less loving, or even a less housewifely wife? Did her competency to correspond with the scholars of Europe render her less capable of gaining the affection of friends of her own sex? Her Homeric studies did not keep her from visiting the poor in the plague–stricken poor–house of Schweinfurth; or detain her from her solitary watch by her sick husband's bedside. No Ciceronian paradoxes were running in her head when all her energies had to be devoted to the reconstructing her own and her husband's home in a strange city; nor did love of study make her forget that "a household was sure to go wrong when the mistress's back was turned." Vittoria Colonna was learned, and a good womanly woman to boot, though she was far less learned, and of far shallower moral nature than Olympia. But then Vittoria was a princess, and therefore much less to the purpose as a sample of the compatibility of high education and intellectual pursuits, with the exemplary discharge of all a woman's ordinary duties. Olympia was the wife of a poor man, and one struggling with difficulties of no ordinary kind. Yet it would be difficult to imagine for him a fitter, more helpful, or more wifely helpmate than Andreas Grünthler found in his reclaimed "Grecian virgin." ISABELLA ANDREINI. (1562.–1604.) Italian love for the theatre.—Italian dramatic literature.—Tragedy.—Comedy.—Tiraboschi's notion of it.—Macchiavelli's Mandragola.—Isabella's high standing among her contemporaries.—Her husband.—Her high character.—Death and epitaph.—Her writings.—Nature and value of histrionic art. Isabella Andreini, say her Italian biographers,[135] was one of the greatest actresses who ever lived. She was also a writer of dramatic and other works, much esteemed by her contemporaries. She was born in 1562, two years before the birth of Shakspeare; and was therefore delighting the courts of Italy and France at the same time that he was catering for the amusement of a more mixed audience at the Globe. It is true that Shakspeare is ... Shakspeare, by virtue of his creative genius, and not of his histrionic talent; while Isabella owed the larger portion of her fame to the latter source. Besides, it would be of course unjust to the Italian actress, as well as preposterous, to dream of instituting any comparison between her and nature's unique master–piece; though her reputation among her contemporaries was probably greater and more noisy than any which testified that the England of Elizabeth's time had a suspicion that a poet for all time had been born among them.