reformer, Bernardino Ochino, and (a thing which does not strike us as
particularly honourable) forwarded his letters to herself unopened to his
spiritual adversaries. But it is evident that Vittoria's "Protestantism"
was a mere pose, assumed at a time when adverse criticism from all sides
was being levelled at the political abuses of the Papacy and at the
various scandals in the Church which were patent to the eyes of all
onlookers. In short her religious verses are if anything more frigid and
artificial than those which compose the _In Memoriam_ to her husband, her
_Bel Sole_, as she usually terms him. Whilst admitting considerable merit
in Vittoria's compositions, we find it at this distance of time very
difficult to understand the extravagant praise which was showered upon her
poems by the Italian critics of the day, or to conceive how a sonnet from
the gifted pen of the Marchioness of Pescara could possibly have been
considered an important event in the literary world by cardinals, princes,
poets, wits and scholars. From Naples to Rome, from Rome to Ferrara, from
Ferrara to Mantua and Milan, the precious manuscript containing the
last-born sonnet of the illustrious Lady of Ischia was eagerly passed
along. Court poets read aloud amidst breathless silence the divine
Vittoria's fourteen lines of jejune sentiment draped in folds of elegant
verbiage; nobles and prelates applauded, hailing the authoress as a
heaven-sent genius. Sincere to a certain extent this strange admiration
undoubtedly was, although the homage was paid perhaps in equal proportions
to the excellence of the verse and to the high rank of the author. She was
a Colonna by birth; she was the widow of a petty despot; she was governor
of a large island;--any literary production, however indifferent, from so
high a personage would have been received throughout Italy with respect or
flattery. But Vittoria was no mean or careless aspirant to fame; it was
the fault of an artificial age rather than the lack of her own natural
ability that has made her poetry cold and soulless, for under healthy
conditions of life and thought, "the Divine Vittoria" was doubtless
capable of producing something warmer and more human than the lifeless but
graceful sonnets that bear her name.

It is chiefly through her close connexion with the great literary movement
of the Italian Renaissance and her intimacy with its leading artists and
writers, rather than through her own reputation