held reputations in the hollow of his hand, with graceful dignity and infinite tact. Living at a time when the great poets were passing, and literature was fast becoming the trade of artisans who appealed to the lowest passions of a sense-intoxicated people, or the tool of cynics and courtiers, she held her own way serenely, superior to worldly motives and worldly entanglements. There are numerous glimpses of her in the poems and letters of her time, but the chorus of praise was universal. “She has more eloquence and breathes more sweetness than all other women,” says Ariosto, “and gives such force to her lofty words that she adorns the heavens in our day with another sun.” And again: “She has not only made herself immortal by her beautiful style, than which I have heard none better, but she can raise from the tomb those of whom she speaks or writes, and make them live forever.” It was her sympathy with all high things that made her so warm a friend to the apostles of the new religious thought. Though an ardent Catholic, she was no bigot to be held within the iron-bound limits of a creed which had lost its moral force, no beauty-loving disciple of an estheticism that veiled crime and corruption with the splendors of a ceremonial, sang Te Deums over the triumphs of the wicked and Misereres while plotting assassination. She felt the need of a purer morality and a deeper spirituality, though, like Savonarola, she wished reform within the church, not outside of it. We find her always in the ranks of the thinkers. She was the devoted friend of Contarini, the broad-minded cardinal, who grieved so sincerely over the universal corruption, and died, possibly of that grief and his own helplessness, before the hour came when it was a crime to speak one’s best thoughts. He should have been Pope, she said in her sonnet on his death, to make the age happy. It was a striking tribute to the vigorous quality of her intellect that he dedicated to her his work “On Free Will.” Fra Bernardino she defended when he fled to Switzerland and joined the Lutherans, but she was powerless to help him in his hours of darkness. Even this brought her under the suspicion of heresy. Carnesecchi, another of her friends, was burned, and one of the chief accusations against a Florentine who was condemned to a like fate years afterward was that he belonged to her circle. “It is an inexpressible pleasure to me that my counsels are approved by a woman of so much virtue and wisdom,” wrote Sadolet to Cardinal Pole. She sustained these powerful prelates by the prestige of her name and the fullness of her sympathy. The liberal circle of her friend Renée attracted her to Ferrara, but the air was full of suspicion. They talked much and pleasantly of literature, poetry, and the arts; when they touched upon the new thought which was revolutionizing the world, it was behind closed doors, and with the vivid consciousness that the walls had ears which stretched to Rome.