The princesses of Urbino had doubtless read Plato. In an age, too, that occupied itself with Boccaccio, who had glorified the senses and written books that no pure and refined woman could read, they had turned to Dante and the spiritual love which was an inspiration and a benediction. In the white soul of Beatrice they found the exquisite flower of womanhood. They caught also the subtle fragrance of the ideal love which Petrarch gave, first to a woman, then to an unfading memory. It was of such a love they dreamed and liked to talk. Then one of the chief apostles of Platonism was the brilliant Bembo, who was the star of this company. “Through love,” he says, “the supreme virtues rule the inferior.” He puts on record and dedicates to Lucrezia Borgia the conversations of three days on its joys and sorrows; but the subject was evidently exhausted, as, at the end, a hermit gives a homily on the vanity of the world. He closes an eloquent apostrophe, however, with these words: “Chase away ignorance and make us see celestial beauty in its perfection. Love, it is the communion with divine beauty, the banquet of angels, the heavenly ambrosia.” On this theme his listeners rang the changes, but not always on so ethereal a plane. The relative constancy of the sexes, the divine right of man, the passive nature of woman, who was called a pale moon to the masculine sun, and various other points, had their fair share of discussion. Between terrestrial and celestial love there are many gradations, and the character and temperament of the men were clearly revealed in their opinions. Some were disposed to be autocrats, others took issue with masculine egotism, and still others dwelt on the sentimental side of the question. One of the Fregosos rather ungraciously assumed the traditional attitude of his sex and contended that women are “imperfect animals,” not at all to be compared with men. But he was in an unpopular minority. The Duchess Elisabetta was a well-poised, discreet woman, who was devoted to her invalid husband, kept her admirers at a prudent distance, and was in no wise a victim to superfluous sensibility. The effusive Bembo, who was given to friendships touched with the fire of the imagination, was untiring in his devotion to this Minerva, but he confessedly adored her as a goddess from afar. The witty and brilliant Emilia Pia had a temperament the reverse of sentimental, and was ready to demolish any castle of moonlight with a shaft of merciless satire. Both brought a solid equipment of common sense into an analysis that often reached a very fine point. But this friendship that was not love, this love that was a sublimated friendship, appealed to them as it did to many others besides poets in a grossly material age. To separate the soul from the senses and intellectualize the emotions, was the natural protest of intelligent women against the old traditions that considered them only as servants or toys of men’s fancies.