lasting fame or beneficial influence. Translated to wider domains, they have shown themselves equal to their situations, and not unfrequently above them. Elizabeth Farnese consolidated the tottering Spanish monarchy in the hands of her feeble, inefficient husband, and defied for years the united powers of England, Holland and Austria; repelled the invader from the Spanish soil, and left her adopted country peaceful if not prosperous. Of Catherine de Medici we have already had occasion to speak, not by any means with affection, though it is impossible to withhold from her a certain degree of admiration for her sternness of purpose and indomitable will. And the mother of the Bonapartes, Madame Letitia, whom it has been too much the fashion to disparage, has given abundant evidence of a sound wisdom and a thorough business capacity, which might have maintained her sons upon the thrones the one conquered, and the others threw away, if they could have by chance inherited these qualities from her. 'And there have been many women in Italy who were worthy of lofty places, had the opportunity but been given them; and who, if they have not attained a lasting fame, were the centres of culture in their times. Poets have lingered lovingly over the courts of the muses at Ferarra and Pesaro. In the now deserted palaces of this family the sweet rhythm of Aminta fell from the lips of Torqualo Tasso; and from the neighboring Urbino came the brilliant and lovely daughters of the Medicis, children of pleasure, with sunny smiles and eager desires for romantic pastimes. Women have been the centers of literary and artistic life in Florence, Ferrara, Bologna, Pesaro, and many other places, inspiring the art they have failed to create. Their influence may be seen in the noble ideals of poets and painters, in the Beatrice of Dante's great poem, in Raphael's Fornarina, in the anonymous beauties of Titian, in Boccaccio's Maria of Naples, and Tasso's Leonora d'Est. The Decameron itself is a sufficient indication of the position which the Italian women held, in the splendid epoch in which it was written. But the noble ladies who were the inspirations and themes of poets and artists were entirely exceptional. They were the effects of the artistic spirit of the time, rather than its creators or its leaders. Like the beautiful peasant girls who sat for Raphael's Madonnas, they lent to the artists forms and faces lovely beyond conception, but the soul which looks out from the beautiful eyes of the pictures had to be supplied from the imagination of the painter. Far from being the types of Italian womanhood, they were the exceptions to its rules, the abstract individualities which stand out from its dead flatness, like mountain peaks rising from the middle of a boundless plain. The masses of the sex were, and continue to be the sport of the circumstances of the moment, without a spark of the ideal glory of womanhood which Italian poets have known so well how to depict. The popular idea of the dignity of the sex may be gathered from the expressions current among the common people at the present time. They say: "He who has a wife, has poverty. "Three daughters and a mother are four devils in a man's family." "A woman is like a chestnut, outwardly fair, inwardly good for nothing." "A single woman has seven hands and one tongue, but when she is married she has seven tongues and one hand." "Two Women and a goose, make a fair." The value of the ideal of the Italian lover, singing sweet melodies to the dainty tones of his mandoline, may be estimated by the following proverb :— "Women, asses, and nuts need hard handling." The Italian is fully conscious of the costliness of the game of love, and says:—" Let him not make love who has no money." He goes so far as to say:-All things come from God, except women, and a woman is scarcely born before she is seeking to be married." He does not spare the husband in saying, " married man-a bird in a cage," or the lover, in telling him-"In buying a horse, and taking a wife, shut thine eyes and commend thyself to God." To conclude; the Italian woman is the creature of the inspiration of the moment. Her feelings are strong without the exultation of moral sentiment. The Italian maiden is the most unselfish creature in the world-for the time being. She is strong only in reflection, and all the fibres of her being centre in her heart, which opens freely to the watchword "Love." Energy is as impossible to her as the moral power of renunciation, and therefore it is not strange that Italian history is so entirely destitute of heroic women; that Italy has produced no Joan of Arc, or Elizabeth of Thuringia. Crowns are too heavy for their frailties in general, and for tragic selfsacrifice they have no vocation. The sunny skies of Italy, which kindle the passions of its women into quick and transient flames, seem to dry up the sources of independence within them. Their characters are passive rather than active, their mental action is slow, their interest in culture feeble, and their negligence and carelessness in household affairs proverbial. From this results their want of order and cleanliness, and their contentment in the position of life in which they seem to have been dropped, rather than been placed. Nothing is more insupportable to strangers than the dreary monotony of Italian family |