Englishmen are wont to estimate the study of the literature of Greece and Rome in a manner very much at variance with the ideas expressed in the above sentences; and judging it, as of course we do, from its results among ourselves, most justly so. It would take us much too far afield to examine satisfactorily why these results should have been so different in the two cases. The most important portion of the causes of difference would probably be found to consist in the dissimilarity of our northern idiosyncrasies to those of the ancient writers. In Italy, the old tree bore its own natural fruit. With us, it was engrafted on another stock. The southern mind became all classical. The northern mind was modified only by contact with the ancient literature. Perhaps also, some weight may be allowed to the greater difficulty of the study in our case; whence it has arisen, that the thorough and analytical study of the dead languages, has been deemed eminently profitable as intellectual discipline, and as the best foundation of general mental culture. And these views of classic learning lead us to attribute almost instinctively, as it were, a high degree of solidity, grave scholastic laboriousness, and respectability to the acquirements of those who possess it. A lady well read in Greek and Latin, appears to us to have necessarily reached an intellectual elevation which places her above the shallowness, superficiality, and frivolousness with which modern female education is ordinarily reproached. And we sigh over the supposed inferiority in this respect, of England in the nineteenth century, to the brilliant Italy of the sixteenth. It is true, that in the case of Vittoria Colonna, we have seen a product of the classical training of that day, which—_mutatis mutandis_—we might be content to reproduce. But the instance is wholly exceptional; and the qualities, moreover, which we admire in Vittoria are to be traced, probably, as far as they are independent on constitutional idiosyncrasy, to those associations with some very remarkable men, which taught her to use her ancient learning as a tool, and not a final object. [Sidenote: COUNCIL OF TRENT.] The subject of these pages is a less exceptional product of Italian sixteenth century classical studies; but by no means a less curious and suggestive exponent of one phase of the social life and manners of that epoch.