We will not ask for a reference to the accurate historian, who overheard, and has chronicled these words. Roccho Pirro, in his learned and voluminous history of the Sicilian prelates, it is true, omits to mention them. Yet, I think, that if his Eminence, Pietro Tagliavia d'Aragona, had been satisfactorily Boswellised, they must have been recorded. For "poor Giulia" had been the mother[4] of the rising young churchman's daughter some fifty years or so before the time at which we find his Eminence working in his vocation at the great dam. And this daughter was the celebrated Tullia (more or less) d'Aragona. [Sidenote: GIULIA OF FERRARA.] What _did_ become of poor Giulia? Giulia of Ferrara, the most celebrated beauty of her day, in all Italy: the noted toast of Rome,—the be–rhymed of ecclesiastical sonnetteers—the sighed–for by purple–stockinged swains: Giulia, the Aspasia of many a frocked Pericles, and the mother of a royal–blooded churchman's child! How should respectable Mnemosyne know what becomes of such? Mnemosyne mentions, with a blush, having just seen her once in the pride of her beauty, flashing with cortège of horses and attendants, and glitter through the streets of Rome.[5] And that is all. Mnemosyne begs to be asked nothing more about her; and proceeds to relate with much complacency the fortunes and preferments of the excellent Cardinal Archbishop, the rules that he made for his clergy, and the privileges and property he acquired for his Church. Yet despite all this propriety on the part of respectable Mnemosyne, despite her decent reticences, and official records of Palermo chapterhouse doings, and Trent diplomacy, despite learned Roccho Pirro's folios and immortality in the columns of Ciacconius,[6] the fact is, that if the name of Archbishop Peter Tagliavia d'Aragona is ever now spoken by the lips of living nineteenth–century men, it is owing, incredible as the circumstance would have seemed to his Eminence, solely to his relationship to little _nullius filia_ Tullia. Not that the blood–royal young churchman, candidate as he was there at Rome, under the immediate eye of infallibility for the Church's highest honours—scarlet stockings, palliums, red hats, and what not—seems to have felt any scruples and embarrassment about the matter. At all events he provided abundantly for his "furtively received daughter," as Zilioli phrases it; and took care that she should receive an education, calculated to make the most of the brilliant talents of all sorts, manifested by her from her earliest childhood. "To the utter astonishment of learned men," says Zilioli, "she was heard to carry on a disputation in Latin while yet a child. She wrote also both in Latin and in Italian compositions worthy of any literary man. So that, when grown up, joining as she did, to her knowledge and worth, an exquisite elegance of manner, she acquired the reputation of being the most perfectly accomplished woman of her time. She appeared in public with