make another! Oh, should the right arm of our fearful greatness be wielded by ungodliness or false religion, who could estimate the mischief done to humanity! And if, on the other hand, our venture should succeed, and our fabulous powers and resources fill the hands of a God-fearing and high-principled people-then what a glorious lifting up of the wide, wide world! The long sought IIou Erw is found, and the Home Mission places the lever. Then all honor and help to the mighty worker! May it have the portion of the first born! May it have the firstlings of fruits, and flocks, and children! Yet we shall not serve it best by giving it all our interest. For its own sake, if for no other, we must divide our regards between it and that helpful sister which goes with the same Gospel to the land of the stranger. And very helpful that sister is! Honor and alms, then, to the Foreign Mission also! May we bid it God speed with new fervor! May we commend it warmly to our patriotism as we are wont to do to our philanthropy! May we help it vigorously, as we would our own sons and daughters! May we lend glowing hand to sow its seed on strange soils, if we would have great reapings and shoutings of the harvest home in the valley of the Mississippi!

ART. IV.-OLIMPIA MORATA.

Vie d' Olympia Morata. Par Jules Bonnet. Paris, 1851. History of the Reformation in Italy. THOMAS MACORIE.

THE list of Italian Protestants is mournfully short, but its names are worthy of warmer remembrance and wider celebrity than they at present possess. What do we hear of Olimpia Morata, of Vittoria Colonna, of Fra Bernardino, and of their comrade stars in the night of Italian papacy. Not accepted in victory like Luther and Knox, they sacrificed themselves as utterly to the same cause, and their offerings at the shrine of conscience should not go unnoticed. The worthiness of their life has a double title to our recollection, because its claims are forgotten or contemned by their own countrymen. They left no descendants in the faith to perpetuate their honor, and

the iron of religious despotism has nearly seared out their names from patriotic remembrance.

Not the most energetic in character, not the most exalted in position, of these unsuccessful reformers, Olimpia Morata is still one of the most interesting, one of those who most naturally speak to our sympathies. An affectionate daughter, a tender wife, a refined and accomplished woman, she possessed large capacities of suffering in the very delicacy and completeness or her nature. She was not called to physical torture, to the stake and the wheel, but simply to banishment, obloquy, poverty, to the sundering of affections, to the slow breaking of heartstrings. She died in exile, and her very memory only remains on earth as an exile. Few of her countrymen know that she ever lived; fewer still ever visited her tombstone at Heidelberg.

Who then was Olimpia Morata? Among the learned Italians of the age of Leo X, was a native of Mantua, Fulvio Peregrino Morato, a laborious scholar, a passionate lover of classic literature, a good critic of Italian prose, a respectable composer of both Latin and Italian verses. He had taught in various portions of Italy, had been preceptor of two young princes of the great house of Este, and had finally settled as Professor in the University of Ferrara. Here he was favored by the Duke, respected by his fellow savants, and became the correspondent and friend of the first living scholar of Italy, the Venetian poet and historian, Cardinal Bembo.

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Morato was married, and had several children, of whom the eldest, born in 1526, he called Olimpia. The child's mind opened its first leaves in an age which was bright with the resurrection of classical learning and beauty, in a land where this apparition was more glorious than in any other. great Rebirth (Rinascimento) of ancient literature, philosophy and art, had risen from its marble and parchment tombs throughout all Italy, and was draping the national mind with an effulgence partly genius, partly imitation. And nowhere, perhaps, in the whole peninsula, was this intellectual movement more favored by rank and authority than at Ferrara. The reigning Duke, Ercole II, was an admirer of literary men and literary pursuits. He prided himself on writing elegantly in prose and verse. He spent large sums in forming a collection of antique medals, which for that day was remarkable. His wife, Renée of France, added her fine mind, her classical acquirements and her taste for poetry to the intellectual brilliance of the court. To this was joined the influence of the Duke's brother, Cardinal Ippolito, of Este, Bishop of Ferrara

and Archbishop of Auch and Milan, who consecrated a liberal proportion of his immense revenues to the encouragement of arts and literature. The University became one of the most celebrated in Italy. The lecture-rooms of its professors were crowded by students from all parts of Europe. There were so many Englishmen there that" they formed a distinct nation by themselves." All these professors, and students, all men who laid claim to any learning, to any elegance of taste, to any standing in society even, were, or pretended to be, enthusiastic admirers of everything that was Greek and Roman, of everything that was classical in form, thought or expression. The childhood of Olimpia was all that such a society could form, or such a father desire. Her precocity was extraordinary; and she early showed an almost feverish taste for the classical studies of the time. This quickness and these inclinations were encouraged by the conversation of her proud father and by the instructions of the best masters. She was taught to stammer her childish thoughts in Greek and Latin; she passed willingly her childish hours in reading Cicero and Homer. Nature and education soon produced a strange maturity in the girl; a tranquil, studious and pensive childishness; fruit bursting from a tree whose leaves were barely unfolded.

At twelve years old Olimpia's fame had already overpassed the limits of her modest home, and attracted the admiration of the learned men of Ferrara. She became their pet, their wonder and their companion. She saw them often, conversed with them freely, corresponded with them in the ancient tongues, and delighted them by the exhibition of tastes similar to their own budding into such early and promising life. One of the most enthusiastic of her scholarly and platonic admirers, was Celio Calcagnini, one of the two founders of the Elevati, the most celebrated academy of Ferrara, a mathematician archaeologist and poet. He used to call her his new Diotimia, his modern and pure-souled Aspasia. "The favor of the muses," he writes her," was thy domestic heritage; thou drewest from the same source the life of the mind and that of the body."

Olimpia soon found other appreciators far higher in rank and influence. The eldest daughter of the duchess of Ferrara, afterwards well known in the court of France as Anne of Este, was now eight years old. She inherited her mother's talents, and it was determined that she should possess her mother's learning. The efforts of the ablest instructors and the docility and quickness of the infant combined to make her a youthful prodigy. Italian, Latin, Greek, she knew them all; she recited passages from Cicero and Demosthenes; she translated fables from Æsop.

Nothing was wanting but a companion who should prosecute the same studies and incite her to continual efforts by friendly emulation. The choice was soon made, and Olimpia Morata found herself at the age of thirteen the intimate companion and classmate of a studious little princess of the house of Este.

The children pursued the same life together which they had done separately. Anne of Este translated fables and other short pieces from Italian into Latin, and sent them to Celio Calcagnini, who praised them and added corrections and ornaments of his own to the style. Olimpia wrote the eulogium of Mutius Scevola in Greek, and used to declaim in the two classic tongues before a small circle of learned and noble auditors. Later, she gave readings of the Paradoxes of Cicero, preluding them by Latin introductions of her own, commenting verbally on the text, and answering questions proposed by her listeners. Years after, when Time, the great scene-changer, had thrown all these pretty episodes into his lumbered past, an Italian scholar, reformer and exile, Celio Secondo Curione, recalled them to memory in his letters, and compared their youthful heroine to the learned women of antiquity. Celio Calcagnini wrote to Olimpia about her compositions, praising the abundance of their ideas and the purity and grace of their style; and when, in her fifteenth year, she dedicated to him an elaborate Latin apology of Cicero, he placed it, as he said, among the most precious treasures of his library. A little Greek ode, in which she eulogized poetry, and declared that she had consecrated her soul and life to its worship, attracted wider attention and drew forth much applause. It is useless to describe more particularly these youthful studies and successes. Years passed away in their prosecution; years of a kind of happiness that would never return; years of studious childhood, of thoughtful girlhood, of earlymatured womanhood.

But a change was to come over the spirit of this dream. A spectre had passed before the face of the nations, and they had awakened confusedly but earnestly at its presence. And the same spiritual cyclops which was moulding centuries of the world's future history was to change and fashion the destinies of Olimpia. We are integral atoms of our race, and cannot detach ourselves from its seemingly disorganized but radically perfect unity. The mingled thoughts which shape the fates of nations reach individual spirits in their remotest tranquilness, bear them onward through mortality, accompany them into the

other world.

Almost unseen by the papacy, the reformation existed in Italy, stealing softly from city to city, from household to house

hold, and from heart to heart, throughout the whole peninsula. In Olimpia's family circle, the first whose ancient belief it withered into ashes was her father. His conversion was chiefly owing to the influence of a dear and constant friend, a distinguished scholar, a man whose history is so singular that it deserves a passing notice. Celio Secondo Curione, born at Turin in 1503, was the youngest of twenty-three children. At the age of nine he was left an orphan, but, being related to several noble Piedmontese families, he received a liberal education in the university of his native city. A beautiful edition of the Bible bequeathed him by his father was his constant companion, and contributed essentially to the formation of his character. At the age of about twenty he obtained from Girolamo Fossianeo and other Augustine monks of the convent of Turin, various tracts of the Lutheran reformers. These writings finished what the Bible had begun; and he longed to visit Germany, where he might hear and talk Protestantism at full liberty. In fact, a few years after, he set out for that country in company with Giacomo Cornello and Francesco Guarino, both imbued with reformed opinions, both afterwards distinguished ministers of reformed churches. On their way through the territories of the bishop of Ivry, they were overheard in discussion by a spy of that zealous prelate, denounced, arrested, and confined in separate cells. Curione was soon released at the intercession of his noble relatives; and the bishop, delighted with his talents, endeavored to re-attach him to Catholicism by giving him money to continue his studies and employing him in his own neighboring priory of San Benigno. The young Italian entered the convent, and passed his time in trying to convert the monks to Protestantism. During a grand religious ceremony in the chapel, the priest opened a box of relics which always stood on the altar, and was horrified at finding the bones gone, and their place sacrilegiously occupied by a Bible, with the inscription: This is the ark of the covenant, and contains the true oracles of God and the true relics of the saints. rione was suspected very justly of this impiety; and he cautiously avoided an examination on the subject by flying to Milan. Here he married a lady of the noble family of Isaici, commenced a series of public lectures on polite literature, and soon established a wide and brilliant reputation.

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He subsequently returned to Turin to obtain his portion of the family patrimony. He found it in possession of one of his sisters and her husband, who denounced him as a heretic and bid him defiance. He retired to a village in Savoy, and supported himself by teaching the children of the surrounding