Such were the examples of female genius which emanated from the courts of Italy, and, spreading to her universities, installed feminine erudition in professorial chairs. Nor was this questionable practice limited within the Italian peninsula. Many Spanish dames were conspicuous in scholarship, and, at the close of the century, Salamanca and Alcala saw their professorships held with applause by ladies equally distinguished for birth and accomplishments. CHAPTER XXV Poetry under the Montefeltri--Sonnets--The Filelfi--Giovanni Sanzi--Porcellio Pandonio--Angelo Galli--Federigo Veterani--Urbani Urbinate--Antonio Rustico--Naldio--Improvisatori--Bernardo Accolti--Serafino d'Aquila--Agostino Staccoli--Early comedies--_La Calandra_--Corruption of morals--Social position of women. Were the lettered court of Duke Federigo to be judged by its minstrels, a harsh sentence might perhaps be awarded. Nor would this be quite fair. Their cold and common-place ideas, their rude and vapid verses, are indeed far beneath the standard of our fastidious age, and scarcely repay those who decipher them in venerable parchments. Yet have we ample evidence of their superiority to many poetasters of Italy, who then emulated Virgil's hexameters, or abused the facilities of their vernacular versification; and it is just the fact of these laureates of Urbino so long surviving the countless rhymers of other principalities, that proves the discriminating patronage of a sovereign, who attached to his court the best writers of his time. Nor must we fail to remember that the now prominent blemishes of their works were then their most admired qualities. The classical sympathies which we usually leave in schools and colleges, or which, when carried prominently about us in the busy world are stigmatised as a pedantic and ungraceful encumbrance, were then in high fashion. They were indispensable to the man of liberal education as his sword and buckler to the soldier; they were adopted among the conventional elements of all literature, poetry, and taste. A standard being thus set up so antipathic to the ideas of our practical age, we are called upon, before proceeding to judgment, to divest ourselves of prejudices which may in their turn become the marvel and ridicule of our posterity. The inherent defects of that minstrelsy, "Whose melody gave ease to Petrarch's wounds,"