We may be tolerably certain too, that had the Duke known all that his wife knew of Messer Peregrino Morato, he would not have permitted another step, which that lady took about the time of which we are speaking, very soon after the return of Morato,—that is, and in all probability not later than 1540. This was the invitation of Olympia to court, to be the companion of her daughter, and sharer in her studies. Renée well knew the power of emulation; and in her eagerness to stimulate the efforts of her daughter, she determined to place beside her one, just five years older than herself, of whose wonderful talents and acquirements all Ferrara was talking. So in, or very near about, 1540, Olympia left her father's humble home and went to be an inmate of the court, in the dissenting interest, or female side of the house. For dissension and dispute were ever more and more openly manifesting themselves in that splendid dwelling. The Duke and his councillors, lay and ecclesiastical, were becoming from day to day more jealously and suspiciously orthodox; as tidings from all parts of Italy showed that the Church was becoming alive to the dangers which threatened it from the new ideas, and, having once realised this fact, was suddenly convinced of their heretical nature, and determined to exert its utmost power to extinguish them by violence. Paul III., a politic and worldly wise old man, with considerable desire to do such parts of a Pope's duty as could be accomplished without interfering with his own projects and schemes of ambition, was quite as much minded as any member of the sacred college to preserve intact to Rome its bishops and high priests, the monopoly of those sacerdotal emoluments and perquisites, which sacramental Christianity was contrived to afford in abundance. Pius IX., a better man, as living in better times than Paul III., found himself in front of the same eternal difficulty. All hope and project of reform had to be abandoned before the too–evident incompatibility of the fundamental sine–quâ–non condition, that "I transmit to my successors intact the power I have received from my predecessors." Thorough reform on the condition, that nothing shall be changed! Poor Pius! So once again Holy Church had to return to its vomit of St. Angelo and Paliano prisons, arbitrary arrests, immaculate conceptions, winking virgins, and concordats. And mankind finding finally, all hope of curing the cancer vain, has to screw its courage to the truly painful and terrible operation of excision;—as mankind silently and with naturally reluctant procrastination, is even now doing.