scale than the poor Ferrara schoolmaster; and would probably have cared for his mistaken accusation as little as for the obscure Fortunio's plagiarism, had not his standing in the world of letters given a very different value to his opinion. Olympia thus passed the first seven years of her life in the tranquil prosperity of a humble home, maintained by the successful labour of its owner, and cheered by the intimate society of congenial friends. That the precocious child had already attracted the notice of the grave and learned seniors who frequented her father's house, is indicated by a passage in a letter from Calcagnini to Morato, when absent from Ferrara, bidding him "to kiss for him the little Muse, whose prattle was already so charming." And at a later date, when writing to her, and recalling his remembrances of her infancy, he says, that the language of the Muses was her earliest mother tongue, "which she had imbibed together with the milk from the breast."[40] [Sidenote: EXILE.] The absence of Morato from Ferrara, which gave rise to the former of these letters, occurred in 1533.[41] That it was involuntary, and regarded by him and his friends as a great misfortune, is certain. It is tolerably clear, also, that it was caused by the will of the Duke. But beyond this we know nothing. Tiraboschi supposed, with a confusion of dates and events, common to most of the Romanist writers, who ever seem to imagine that heresy was always heresy, the same in 1533 as in 1553, that he was exiled for the heterodoxy of his religious opinions. But that historian admits, that he afterwards saw reason to change his opinion on this point.[42] Whatever may have been the cause of a removal, which the nature of Morato's connection with Ferrara make him feel as an expatriation, it is certain that it lasted for six years,[43]—the six years that carried Olympia from seven to thirteen years of age, a period in the life of a girl of the southern blood on the sunny side of the Alps, which may probably be equivalent to that included between the tenth and sixteenth year of a child of our more tardily developed race. The nature of her home in Ferrara, and of the influences that surrounded it, have been indicated. But of those which had the forming of her character during these important years of exile, we know nothing. And Olympia's biographers, in dwelling on her progress under the eyes of her father's learned friends at Ferrara, and attributing to them, in great measure, the truly remarkable degree of classical scholarship to which she attained, seem to have too much forgotten the importance of this period, when she was withdrawn from their instructions. The force of this will be more apparent, when we come to see the extent of her attainments at the time of her return, in her thirteenth year.