I have been thinking over the matter to-night. The good lady was
wrong. Whatever were the morals of the Renaissance, personalities were
essentially positive. They were devilishly wicked or angelically good.
There was nothing _rosse_, non-moral about the Renaissance Italian.
The women were strongly tempered. I love to believe the story told by
Machiavelli and Muratori of Catherine Sforza in the citadel of Forli.
"Surrender or we slay your children which we hold as hostages," cried
the besiegers. "Kill them if you like. I can breed more to avenge them."
It is the speech of a giant nature. It awakens something enthusiastic
within me; although such a lady would be an undesirable helpmeet for a
mild mannered man like myself.

And then again there is Bonna, the woman for whose career I desired to
consult the prime authority Cristoforo da Costa. I have been sketching
her into my chapter tonight. Here is a peasant girl caught up to his
saddle-bow by a condottiere, Brunoro, during some village raid. She
fights like a soldier by his side. He is imprisoned in Valencia by
Alfonso of Naples, languishes in a dungeon for ten years. And for
ten years Bonna goes from court to court in Europe and from prince to
prince, across seas and mountains, unwearying, unyielding, with the
passion of heaven in her heart and the courage of hell in her soul,
urging and soliciting her man's release. After ten long years she
succeeds. And then they are married. What were her tumultuous feelings
as she stood by that altar? The old historian does not say; but the very
glory of God must have flooded her being when, in the silence of the
bare church, the little bell tinkled to tell her that the Host was
raised, and her love was made blessed for all eternity. And then she
goes away with him and fights in the old way by his side for fifteen
years. When he is killed, she languishes and dies within the year.
Porcelli sees them in 1455. Brunoro, an old, squinting, paralysed man.
Bonna, a little shrivelled, yellow old woman, with a quiver on her
shoulder, a bow in her hand; her grey hair is covered by a helmet
and she wears great military boots. The picture is magical. There is
infinite pathos in the sight of the two withered, crippled, grotesque
forms from which all the glamour of manhood and beauty have departed,
and infinite awe in the thought of the holy communion of the
unconquerable and passionate souls. I wonder it has not come down to us
as one of the