wealthy alliance; his hopes and his plans being even a day's march beyond his power of overtaking them by performance. There is extant a letter written on this occasion by Torquato (probably at the dictation of his father) to Signora Vittoria Colonna, in which the lad bitterly complains against the cruelty of his uncles in forcing this match upon his sister; and implores her interference to prevent the entailment of poverty and disgrace upon the young Cornelia, by such a sacrifice of her person and property to the mercenary views of her relatives. "It is hard," says the reputed writer, "to lose one's fortune; but the degradation of blood is much harder to bear. My poor old father has only us two; and, since fortune has robbed him of his property, and of a wife whom he loved as his own soul, suffer not rapacity to deprive him of his beloved daughter, in whose bosom he hoped to finish tranquilly the few last years of his old age. We have no friends at Naples; our relations are our enemies, and, on account of the circumstances of my father's situation, every one fears to take us by the hand." These stern but tender sentiments, wrung in the agony of heart-sickness from the father, were written, not only by the hand of the son upon the paper of the epistle, but on his own heart, and became identified with his personal feelings through life. Though he never suffered the escutcheon of his family to be blemished by a humbling connection, yet he paid dearly, both in his affections and in his pride, to preserve it; and, if the tradition of his love for a princess of the house of Este be founded in truth, he must have felt that he was himself, in that case, playing the part of "some poor gentleman," whose alliance would be a degradation of the most ancient blood of Italy. Both the father and the son, in the sequel, were reconciled--first for Cornelia's sake, and afterwards for his own--to her husband; who proved a worthy and kind consort, with whom she lived happily, though not long, and by whom she had several children.