[27] Les Poetes Francais jusqu'a Malherbes, par Augin. A good edition of the works of Clotilde de Surville was published at Paris in 1802, and another in 1804. I believe both have become scarce. Her _Poesies_ consist of pastorals, ballads, songs, epistles, and the fragment of an epic poem, of which the MS. is lost. Of her merit there is but one opinion. She is confessedly the greatest poetical genius which France could boast in a period of two hundred years; that is, from the decline of the Provencal poetry, till about 1500. CHAPTER V. CONJUGAL POETRY CONTINUED. VITTORIA COLONNA. Half a century later, we find the name of an Italian poetess, as interesting as our Clotilde de Surville, and far more illustrious. Vittoria Colonna was not thrown, with all her eminent gifts and captivating graces, among a rude people in a rude age; but all favourable influences, of time and circumstances, and fortune, conspired, with native talent, to make her as celebrated as she was truly admirable. She was the wife of that Marquis of Pescara, who has earned himself a name in the busiest and bloodiest page of history:--of that Pescara who commanded the armies of Charles the Fifth in Italy, and won the battle of Pavia, where Francis the First was taken prisoner. But great as was Pescara as a statesman and a military commander, he is far more interesting as the husband of Vittoria Colonna, and the laurels he reaped in the battle-field, are perishable and worthless, compared to those which his admirable wife wreathed around his brow. So thought Ariosto; who tell us, that if Alexander envied Achilles the fame he had acquired in the songs of Homer, how much more had he envied Pescara those strains in which his gifted consort had exalted his fame above that of all contemporary heroes? and not only rendered herself immortal; Col dolce stil, di che il miglior non odo, Ma puo qualunque, di cui parli o scriva Trar dal sepolcro, e fa ch'eterno viva. He prefers her to Artemisia, for a reason rather quaintly expressed,-- ----Anzi Tanto maggior, quanto e piu assai beli' opra, Che por sotterra un uom, trarlo di sopra. "So much more praise it is, to raise a man above the earth, than to bury him under it." He compares her successively to all the famed heroines of Greece and Rome,--to Laodamia, to Portia, to Arria, to Argia, to Evadne,--who died with or for their husbands; and concludes, Quanto onore a Vittoria e piu dovuto Che di Lete, e del Rio che nove volte L'ombre circonda, ha tratto il suo consorte, Malgrado delle parche, e della morte.[28]