The name of Tullia d'Aragona lives in the pages of Italian literary historians, and in the memory of educated Italians as a poetess. But she would not have merited presentation to the English reader as such. As a remarkable social phenomenon, the product of the social soil of the sixteenth century under the sun of the _renaissance_, the story of her life, imperfect as it is, is well worth notice. OLYMPIA MORATA. (1526–1555.) CHAPTER I. Good Old Times in Ferrara—How a Pope's Daughter became a Duchess—Bygones were bygones—and Love was still the Lord of all. A certain class of writers, probably among the most sincere and earnest of the defenders of the Catholic faith, have been driven by the social aspect presented by all those countries in which Catholicism has power, to admit, accept, and justify the absence of material, and even intellectual prosperity, as a necessary consequence of catholic views of life here and hereafter. Material prosperity, say these ascetics,—plenty to eat and to drink, good clothing, commodious habitations, life–embellishing arts, and ministrations of all sorts to corporeal well–being, are not the proper objects of man here on this earth. Nay, the wisest of mankind have in all ages, they say, recognised such things as highly inimical to the pursuit of that better aim, to which all human endeavour should tend. While the fatal consequences resulting from untrammelled intellectual culture, are among the surest and saddest teachings of human experience. That the true and faithful fashioning of life therefore in accordance with the doctrines of a creed, the whole scope and tendency of which is the undivided pursuit of that higher and better aim, should be found unconducive to material and merely human intellectual advantages, is, they urge, not only what might reasonably be anticipated, but is a confirmatory proof of the correctness of those views, which it cannot be denied have made Catholic countries what they are. [Sidenote: TENDENCIES OF CATHOLICISM.] Such doctrine, though little likely to be deemed conclusive by enlightened intelligence, or acceptable by the popular mind, has at all events the advantage of moving the question into a strictly theological court, into which the economist, the historian, the moralist, the politician, and the philanthropist, are not obliged to follow it. For their purposes it is sufficient, that the tendency of Catholicism to produce poverty, squalor, ignorance, and depopulation, should be admitted and registered. And they may well afford, at this period of the world's history, to treat with a silent shrug, the theory of those, who declare that these things are preferable to enlightenment, abundance, and material prosperity.