dmirers, for her admirers, as I have said, were all great lords that
were used to handsome dwellings and sumptuous appointments and costly
adornings, but there was never one of them that seemed to dwell so
splendidly as Monna Vittoria.

Now I, that came to her with nothing save such credit as I might hope to
have for the sake of my verses, could look at all this magnificence with
an indifferent eye. Yet I will confess that as I moved through so much
sumptuousness, and breathed such strangely scented air, I was stirred
all of a sudden with strange and base envy of those great personages for
whom this brave show was spread, and found myself wishing unwittingly
that I were some great prince of the Church or adventurous
free-companion who might not, indeed, command--for there were none who
could do that--but hope for the lady's kindness. Although I assured
myself lustily that a poet was as good as a prince, in my heart, and in
the presence of all this luxury, I knew very dismally that it was not
so, and that Monna Vittoria would never be persuaded to think so. As I
have already said, I had no great yearning for these magnificent
mercenaries of the hosts of Love, for these bejewelled amazons that
seemed made merely to prove to man that he is no better than an
unutterable ass. My pulses never thrilled tumultuously after her kind,
and in the free air of the fields I would not have changed one of my
pretty sweethearts against Monna Vittoria. But somehow in that fantastic
palace of hers, with its enchanted atmosphere and its opulent
surroundings, my cool reason of the meadows and the open air seemed at a
loss, and I found myself ready, as it were, to surrender to Circe like
any hog pig of them all.

If this were the time and the place, I should like to try to find out,
by the light of a dry logic, and with the aid of a cold process of
analysis, why these Timandras and Phrynes have so much power over men.
Perhaps, as I am speaking of Monna Vittoria, I should add the Aspasias
to my short catalogue of she-gallants, for Vittoria was a woman well
accomplished in the arts, well-lettered, speaking several tongues with
ease, well-read, too, and one that could talk to her lovers, when they
had the time or the inclination for talking, of the ancient authors of
Rome, and of Greece, too, for that matter--did I not say her mother was
a Greek?--and could say you or sing you the stanzas of mellifluous
poets, most ravishingly to the ear. She k