The grand-daughter of that Carlo Malatesta (who took so much to heart the Gospel precepts of sacrificing whatever gives scandal—be it a man’s own right eye, or right hand—that he had, during his guardianship of a Gonzaga minor, thrown into the lake, at Mantua, a statue of Virgil, to which he found the people paying idolatrous reverence), her girlhood had been spent in Rimini, as great in repentance as in crime. Rimini hath other memories besides that of Francesca; and Madonna Paola, in the very year[9] when the fate of her kinswoman, Parisina, at the hands of her husband, Marquis Nicholas of Ferrara, recalled, but too exactly, the story heard by Dante in the Second Circle of the Inferno, may well have turned to one of them for comfort. During the years of her girlhood, Rimini was the scene of the labours of the great Dominican reformer, the Blessed Giovanni Dominici. This remarkable man was a great friend of her grandfather, and we may well assume that his book, the “Regola del Governo di Cura famigliare,” though dedicated to a Florentine lady, Madonna Bartolommea, wife of Antonio Alberti (and kinswoman of the celebrated Leo Battista Alberti) was not unknown to those who had charge of Paola’s education, and, very probably, represented one of the very strongest influences of her girlhood. If this be so, it is impossible to see nothing more than a mere chance in the selection of a teacher who had already made a name for himself by a system of education exactly corresponding to that outlined in Dominici’s treatise. In studying the Renaissance, we are under a great disadvantage from the fact that its best known interpreters are generally quite incapable of appreciating the force and vivacity of religion during it. Symonds, and Burckhardt, and Settenbrini, setting out to prove Michelet’s theory that “the Renaissance was a discovery of the World and Man,” reject and misinterpret anything that contradicts it. The Middle Ages must be made as dark, and stagnant, and evil-smelling as possible—the “Dead Sea” indeed of Symonds; and the guiding principle of the Middle Ages, the Catholic Religion, must be a Spirit of Darkness—otherwise, what becomes of the theory? Poor Humanity, according to Symonds, had a cowl put on it by the Obscurantist Church, and was bidden to look neither “on the azure of the waters, nor the luxuriance of the vines, nor the radiance of the mountains with their robe of sun and snow.” And so, with downcast eyes, it passed on its way, knowing nothing but that “beauty is a snare, pleasure a sin, the world a fleeting show, man fallen and lost, death the only certainty, judgment inevitable, hell everlasting, heaven hard to win, _ignorance acceptable to God_.” “These,” we were told, were the “fixed ideas of the mediæval Church.”