Thus in Ferrara, as indeed throughout Italy, things were very different from what they had been during the latter half of the fifteenth century. Men might with some show of reason talk of the good old times, and look out on those around them with misgiving and despondency. And yet the Phœnix was burning herself as usual; only, as must be admitted, with more than ordinary amount of pestilential stench and stifling smoke,—smoke so stifling, so pestilential, that but few of those, who had to draw their life–breath, as best they might, in the midst of it, attained to any remotest guess that all this so sulphureous smother, and confused darkness of the air, was in truth but caused by that Phœnix burning, and preparatory for a purer atmosphere when it was accomplished. Few in any age can gain such Pisgah–glimpse of the coming time; fewest in that of which this writing treats. [Sidenote: THE WORLD IN HER DAY.] But of those few our Olympia, as it is hoped the reader will see reason to believe, was one. Yet that terrible burning time,—such a Phœnix burning as the world has once and once only seen since—was but on the eve of beginning in the scene on which Olympia had to appear, at the time of her appearance. Her mortal career had to be passed in the midst of the very densest smoke–clouds of the funeral pyre. Easy for us, looking back over the traversed maze with chart in hand, to understand the plan of it! Easy enough to talk of renaissance and glorious morning–tide spring of human thought! To those in the thick of the sweltering struggle, it was as the eve of dissolution and universal cataclysm. CHAPTER II. Troublous new times in Ferrara—How a French King's daughter became a Duchess—Bygones were aught but bygones—and Mitre and Cowl were lords of all. Previously to this celebrated era of "renaissance," all the business of education, such as it was, had necessarily been in the hands of the clergy. But the well–known circumstances which at the beginning of the sixteenth century led to a new zeal for the study of the languages of ancient Greece and Home, led also to the creation of a totally new class of teachers. The most eminent professors of the new learning were men, whose position made it necessary that their acquirements should be made a means of gaining a livelihood. And they became therefore for the most part professional teachers. They were also generally laymen. A body of lay pedagogues was a new thing in the world; and surely one of no small significance. For though these men professed simply to give instruction in the Greek or in the Latin tongue and literature, not to educate their pupils, yet the mass of idea, unstamped by the ecclesiastical mint, which was necessarily thus circulated, must have exercised an influence, which has perhaps not been estimated at its worth, in inquiries into the causes of the mental tendencies of that period. [Sidenote: PEREGRINO MORATO.]