Strange to relate, her husband, the Marquis of Pescara, was destined to forestall his learned lady in the matter of poetry, for during his imprisonment at Milan in the year 1512, he composed a “Dialogo d’Amore” to send to his sorrowing wife at Ischia, a production which the learned Paolo Giovio, the historian and bishop of Nocera, pronounced as being “summae jucunditatis,” though in reality it seems to have been feeble enough. But however halting and commonplace the warrior’s verses, Pescara’s composition had the immediate effect of opening the flood-gates of his wife’s poetic temperament, for she replied at once to her spouse’s effort with an epistle conceived in the _terza rima_ employed by Dante, and though the poem is turgid in diction and shallow in thought, full of classical names and allusions, “a parade of all the treasures of the school-room,” it exhibits the graceful ease and high scholarship which mark all Vittoria’s writings. Meanwhile, unblest with offspring of her own and ever separated by the cruel circumstance of war from the husband she seemed perfectly content to admire from a distance, Vittoria did not expend all her time at Ischia in sacrificing to Apollo and the Muses, for she now undertook the education of her husband’s young cousin and heir, Alphonso d’Avalos, Marchese del Vasto, whose manhood certainly did credit to his instructress, for del Vasto under her influence grew up to be a brave soldier and a tolerable scholar. After sixteen years of married life with a husband who, although professing deep devotion to his brilliant and virtuous consort, was almost invariably absent from her side, Vittoria found herself left a widow shortly after the great battle of Pavia in 1525 wherein Francis I. of France surrendered to the Emperor Charles V. The Marquis of Pescara, after the usual career of bloodthirsty adventures which passed in those days for a life of knight-errantry, died at Milan towards the close of this year, leaving behind him an unenviable reputation for treachery towards his master. But however hard were the things said of the deceased Fernando d’Avalos by the outside world, no breath of suspicion seems ever to have penetrated to the heart of the faithful if placid Vittoria, who mourned bitterly if somewhat theatrically over her departed hero. The Lady of the Rock was now in her thirty-fifth year, and her beauty, so we are told, still remained undimmed; in fact it was rather improved by a tendency towards plumpness, for sorrow and poetry are not necessarily associated with a meagre appearance. Spending her time partly in the great Italian cities, but chiefly on her beloved _scoglio superbo_, the widow of Pescara now set herself to write that series of sonnets in memory of her dead husband which have rescued his unworthy name from oblivion and have rendered her own famous in Italian literature. For the sonnets of Vittoria Colonna, though appearing cold classical and pedantic to our northern