Perhaps a prudent caution induced Peregrino Morato to withdraw from courtly notice, and be as little heard of as possible. Be the motive what it might, he did retire, and somewhere in 1546 his daughter was sent for to see him breathe his last. She afterwards returned to the court, but not to her former favour. By degrees, there is no doubt that the influence of some of her old masters, particularly of the two brothers Sinapi, led her too into the obnoxious path. She saw more than one of those she most honoured thrown into prison, persecuted and banished, and ready to bear every mark of ducal displeasure, rather than disavow their honest thoughts; and thus, probably, first came to herself, a grand awakening from the worldliness and intellectuality of her former life. Before this it seems to have been rather a distaste for Catholicism than any determined acceptance of the faith of her reforming friends. This, we know, was the general character of those who thought freely in the polite courts of Italy. They loved to speculate and were impatient of restraint, but a positive rebellion was but rarely thought of. In Olympia Morata, and in some few others, another result took place; and, while history does not furnish us with all the particulars we could wish for respecting these individual cases, we have quite enough to enable us to decide on every really important point touching the conduct they pursued.

Of our own heroine at all events we have ample record, and scarcely any thing in biography is more remarkable than the coming out of her freed spirit from its scholastic shell. No doubt some of her mental tendencies remained; we find a considerable inclination to indulge in controversial metaphysics, and, had unbroken prosperity been her lot, perhaps the old pedantry would have been brought into the new principles; but the prac

tical life of stern reality which was before her afforded no time for mere speculation, and it is pleasant to see how one by one she drops what was unmeaning and over-estimated in the former part of her career, to be invested with the charm of an earnest, practical, governing purpose. Hence too the large growth of benevolence, of which there is little trace before: but now her heart expands, and she pours out with ease and fervour the full stream of her affectionate sympathy for friends and fellow-inquirers and sufferers.

We have said that the death of her father appears to have been the signal for the withdrawal of the remains of court favour. About the same time Anna d'Este, her companion and friend, married Francis Duke of Guise, and, as the younger sisters, Leonora and Lucretia, were never associated with her in the same manner, her term of service had naturally expired, and she henceforth lived at home with her sickly mother, two sisters, and a brother, till the period of her marriage, about two years afterwards.

Kind friends still remained to her, even at the court,-the Lady Lavinia de Rovere, of the House of Urbino, in particular,—and several others; but from the Duchess she received not merely no kindness, but positive neglect, if not injustice and injury. It seems to us clear that her own conduct with regard to some among the Reformers made her obnoxious to the Duke, and that he was willing enough

to

asperse those who put his dukedom in jeopardy, since unquestionably the Court of Ferrara had, for a long time, been looked on by the Romish see as an asylum for heretics. Poverty, then, and a struggle both with pecuniary troubles and with evil report, were from this time the lot of the whole household of Morato.

A new lot and a new land were now placed before Olympia. She com

;

image is always before me, by night and by_day."

In her quiet hours she now and then wrote and translated. She turned some of the psalms into Greek; and she and her husband diligently read the Scriptures, and cultivated intimacy with some of the pious adherents to the Eglise Evangelique of Schweinfurt. More than two years passed thus. There was at least peace in their home, whatever might be the threatening state of Germany; until, most unhappily for Schweinfurt, one ambitious man, Albert of Brandenburg, chose to locate himself within its walls, and carry on an exterminating war all around; the more unjustifiably, as, by the treaty of Passau, an universal quietude ought to have been observed by all parties. Of course such outrages could not be allowed. Elector Maurice and other dignitaries threw themselves upon the town which Albert had made his head quarters. They besieged it closely for fourteen months, at the conclusion of which period the place was taken, and all the the inhabitants subjected to ill usage, death, or banishment. Few suffered more, short of the preservation of life, than Grunthler, his wife, and her brother. They lost every article of property, and were turned into the open country in an inclement season, with insufficient clothing and without food. In the letter in which Olympia details these calamities, she says:

The

"By the mercy of God we escaped from the fire, but twice my husband fell into the enemy's hands. Judge of my despair. If ever prayer was ardently proffered, mine was so then. **** Could you but have seen the pitiable state to which I was reduced! In tatters, my hair dishevelled, without shoes, and obliged even to run in this state along the shores of the river, on the hard sand and gravel. When I think that in this state I actually walked ten miles that night, I am astonished, having been very ill only the day before; but the Lord has had pity on us: by a kind stranger hand he has sent us money, and led us to a noble family, who have clothed and received us honourably; and now we are in the city of Heidelberg, where my husband has been named Professor of Medicine."

The family alluded to, that of the Counts of Erpach, were connected by marriage with Frederic the Second, Elector Palatine, and it was through their interest that the Professorship of Medicine was obtained for Grunthler; but here it may be observed, that neither in this place, nor anywhere else in the letters of Olympia, is there the slightest mention of any such honour as that of election to a professorial chair (which, though not unprecedented, would have been sufficiently remarkable to occasion surely some notice from her pen,) being awarded to herself. It is also notable that in a long and touching letter from her husband, detailing the circumstances of her death, and passing in review her character and attainments, there is no mention of this circumstance; neither is it recorded on her tomb. This negative evidence seems to us to tell strongly against the vague tradition alluded to; but it is extremely probable that some rumour of intentions, unfulfilled in consequence of the rapid decline of her health, may have gone abroad.

We have in her own letters details of far other avocations.

"My husband," says she, "prepares his public lectures, and as for me, I spend my time in getting together such articles of furniture as cannot be dispensed with." "My weak health," she adds, " obliges me to keep a servant, the only female one I can find; but she wants a gold florin per month, still requiring to work on her own

account.

I have submitted, from pure necessity, but all the riches of the satraps would not allow me to submit to such an

imposition. Do help me to another servant, old or young; I would pay her five florins a year," &c.*

Their poverty was indeed such as to render every kind of economy ne

cessary.

Thus, when pressed to receive the daughter of her old friend and master Sinapi, for the purpose of giving her the advantages of education and example, she says, "I will willingly bid her welcome here, if she prefers our humble interior to that of a court, but she must bring her bed with her, for furniture is very dear, and we can afford but little."

One could hardly look, under such circumstances, for active help to others, though more in need than themselves: yet it certainly was given. The poor outcasts of Schweinfurt, the sick who had been visited in the hospitals there, were not forgotten; and the dispenser of her alms writes, "The sum you have sent me shall be sacredly devoted to the object of your wishes," though "the women you visited have disappeared, no one knows where." The end however both of her own sufferings, and of the power to alleviate those of others, was drawing nigh. At no time was Olympia Morata endowed with robust health, and the severe trials of the past year had left her, not weakened merely, but the victim of pulmonary disease. The cold climate of Germany rapidly increased her complaints, while anxiety for her husband, who was constantly attending patients under the plague then raging in Heidelberg, doubtless hastened her end. In this state she wrote her last letter to her old friend Celio Curione.

"May God preserve you long for the good of your church! but as for me, dear Celio, I ought to inform you that there is no hope of my life being prolonged. Medicine can do nothing for me. Most probably this is the last letter you will receive from me. My flesh and strength are gone. Day and night the cough threatens me with suffocation, and my pains take from me all sleep. Nothing then remains but to render up my soul. But to my last breath I shall remember all whom I have loved. Let not the news of my death 'grieve you: I know who gives me the victory, and I desire to depart and be with Jesus."

แ

She lived but a few days longer. Her husband watching over her bed saw her smile, and asked the reason, "I see nothing before me but the purest and brightest light," she replied. Soon," he observed, "you will dwell in that light." She smiled again, and whispered, "Happy, entirely happy!" and in a few more hours she passed from quiet sleep to death, on the morning of the 7th of November, 1555, a little before the completion of her twenty-ninth year.

Her husband, who poured forth his

sorrow in a letter to their common friend Celio Curione, inclosing that last farewell from her own pen which we have above cited, did not long survive her. In two months after her decease he fell a victim to the plague, whose horrors he had braved with a daring which seemed to be almost that of despair, and, in a few days more, the young brother Emilio followed him in his fate. They were all three interred in one tomb in the church of St. Peter's, and above it was placed by the hand and at the expense of a brother professor, William Rascalon, a Frenchman, a monumental stone bearing the following inscription:

"Deo imm. S. et virtuti ac memoriæ

Olympia Moratæ, Fulvii Morati Mantuani, viri doctissimi filiæ, Andreæ Grunthleri medici conjugis, beatissimæ fœminæ, cujus ingenium ac singularis utrisque linguæ cognitio, in moribus autem probatus, summumque pietatis studium, supra communem modum semper existimata sunt. Quod de ejus vita hominum judicium, beata mors, sanctissime ac pacatissime ab ea obitu, divino quoque confirmavit testimonio. Obiit, mutato solo, a salute D.L.V. supra mille, suæ ætatis xxix. Hic cum marito et Emilio fratre sepulta."

Thus lived and died a good and brave woman, whose fate and mental characteristics were alike operated upon unfavourably, no doubt, by the circumstances of her time, in as far as her literary renown has been concerned, but whose memory must always be dear to the pure and conscientious. There can, we think, be no question that twenty more years of life would have placed her in a very different position. As it is, those influences which led to the early repression of the Reformation in Italy, have been successful in overshadowing the memory of her great powers in the land of her birth, while she herself was but just coming into the due appreciation of modern tongues and literature. Her divided life leaves in both kinds an unsatisfactory result, except in so far as it is redeemed by a moral excellence and beauty which cannot be prized too highly. The impression to those who take it in the

A note in our possession taken from