tenance from Lucia,
the young Signora appeared absorbed in one of those tender sonnets which
then turned the brains and inflamed the hearts of Italy. (Although it is
true that the love sonnets of Petrarch were not then, as now, the most
esteemed of his works, yet it has been a great, though a common error,
to represent them as little known and coldly admired. Their effect was,
in reality, prodigious and universal. Every ballad-singer sung them
in the streets, and (says Filippo Villani), "Gravissimi nesciebant
abstinere"--"Even the gravest could not abstain from them.")

Born of an impoverished house, which, though boasting its descent from
a consular race of Rome, scarcely at that day maintained a rank
amongst the inferior order of nobility, Nina di Raselli was the spoiled
child--the idol and the tyrant--of her parents. The energetic and
self-willed character of her mind made her rule where she should have
obeyed; and as in all ages dispositions can conquer custom, she had,
though in a clime and land where the young and unmarried of her sex
are usually chained and fettered, assumed, and by assuming won, the
prerogative of independence. She possessed, it is true, more learning
and more genius than generally fell to the share of women in that day;
and enough of both to be deemed a miracle by her parents;--she had,
also, what they valued more, a surpassing beauty; and, what they feared
more, an indomitable haughtiness;--a haughtiness mixed with a thousand
soft and endearing qualities where she loved; and which, indeed, where
she loved, seemed to vanish. At once vain yet high-minded, resolute yet
impassioned, there was a gorgeous magnificence in her very vanity and
splendour,--an ideality in her waywardness: her defects made a part
of her brilliancy; without them she would have seemed less woman; and,
knowing her, you would have compared all women by her standard. Softer
qualities beside her seemed not more charming, but more insipid. She had
no vulgar ambition, for she had obstinately refused many alliances which
the daughter of Raselli could scarcely have hoped to form. The untutored
minds and savage power of the Roman nobles seemed to her imagination,
which was full of the poetry of rank, its luxury and its graces, as
something barbarous and revolting, at once to be dreaded and despised.
She had, therefore, passed her twentieth year unmarried, but not without
love. The faults, themselves, of her character, elevated that i