most happy,
feeding her soul with fire and tears. At last she returned to Rome, to
her own people, in her forty-ninth year. There she was visited by the
old Emperor for whom her husband had given his life, and there she met
Michelangelo.

It was natural enough that they should be friends. It is monstrous to
suppose them lovers. The melancholy of their natures drew them together,
and the sympathy of their tastes cemented the bond. To the woman-hating
man of genius, this woman was a revelation and a wonder; to the great
princess in her perpetual sorrow the greatest of creative minds was a
solace and a constant intellectual delight. Their friendship was mutual,
fitting and beautiful, which last is more than can be said for the
absurd stories about their intercourse which are extant in print and
have been made the subject of imaginary pictures by more than one
painter. The tradition that they used to meet often in the little Church
of Saint Sylvester, behind the Colonna gardens, rests upon the fact that
they once held a consultation there in the presence of Francesco
d'Olanda, a Portuguese artist, when Vittoria was planning the Convent of
Saint Catherine, which she afterwards built not very far away. The truth
is that she did not live in the palace of her kinsfolk after her return
to Rome, but most probably in the convent attached to the other and
greater Church of Saint Sylvester which stands in the square of that
name not far from the Corso. The convent itself is said to have been
originally built for the ladies of the Colonna who took the veil, and
was only recently destroyed to make room for the modern Post-office, the
church itself having passed into the hands of the English. The
coincidence of the two churches being dedicated to the same saint
doubtless helped the growth of the unjust fable. But in an age of great
women, in the times of Lucrezia Borgia, great and bad, of Catherine
Sforza, great and warlike, Vittoria Colonna was great and good; and the
ascetic Michelangelo, discovering in her the realization of an ideal,
laid at her feet the homage of a sexagenarian's friendship.

In the battle of the archaeologists the opposing forces traverse and
break ground, and rush upon each other again, 'hurtling together like
wild boars,'--as Mallory describes the duels of his knights,--and when
learned doctors disagree it is not the province of a searcher after
romance to attempt a definition of exact truths. 'Some romances