"I should like to say more; but the occupations of my family do not permit me to waste more time. Only I thank Signor Silvio for his work and for having punished me, who am innocent of guilt, by filling my breast with constant disquiet and perhaps with perpetual unhappiness." This literal translation is far from rendering the feminine animation, the foreign grace, the spirited simplicity of the text; the dialect which Zanze employs exhales a raciness of the soil which it is impossible to transfuse into another language. The _apologia_, with its incorrect, nebulous, unfinished phrases, like the vague extremities of a group by Albani[231]; the manuscript, with its defective or Venetian spelling, is like a Greek woman's monument, but of those women of the time when the Bishops of Thessaly[232] sang the loves of Theagenes and Chariclea. I prefer the two pages of the little gaoler's daughter to all the dialogues of the great Isotta[233], although she pleaded for Eve against Adam as Zanze pleads for herself against Pellico. My fair Provençal country-women of other days still more recall the daughter of Venice by the idiom of those intermediary generations, among which the language of the vanquished is not yet entirely dead and the language of the victor not yet entirely formed. [Sidenote: Zanze _v._ Pellico.] Which is in the right: Pellico or Zanze? What is the matter in dispute? A simple confidence, a doubtful kiss, which, in effect, was perhaps not meant for him who received it. The angry bride refuses to recognise herself in the delicious growing child pictured by the captive; but she contests the fact with so much charm that she proves it while denying it. The portrait of Zanze in the plaintiffs memorial is so like that we find it again in the defendant's rejoinder: the same sentiment of religion and humanity, the same reserve, the same note of mystery, the same soft and tender unconstraint. Zanze is full of power when she avers, with passionate candour, that she would not have dared to kiss her own brother, much less M. Pellico. Zanze's filial piety is extremely touching, when it transforms Brollo into an old soldier of the Republic, reduced to the gaoler's state _per sola combinazione._ Zanze is quite admirable when she makes this observation: Pellico concealed the name of an unprincipled man and was not afraid to reveal that of an innocent creature who showed compassion for the sufferings of the prisoners. Zanze is not enticed by the idea of being immortal in an immortal work; that idea does not even occur to her mind: she is struck only by a man's indiscretion; that man, if we are to believe the person offended, sacrifices a woman's reputation to the sports of his talent without giving a care to the harm that he may cause, thinking only of writing a novel to benefit his reputation. A visible dread governs Zanze: will not a prisoner's revelations rouse a husband's jealousy?