A Decade of Italian Women, vol. 2 (of 2)

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

The nature of her home in Ferrara, and of the influences that surrounded it, have been indicated. But of those which had the forming of her character during these important years of exile, we know nothing. And Olympia's biographers, in dwelling on her progress under the eyes of her father's learned friends at Ferrara, and attributing to them, in great measure, the truly remarkable degree of classical scholarship to which she attained, seem to have too much forgotten the importance of this period, when she was withdrawn from their instructions. The force of this will be more apparent, when we come to see the extent of her attainments at the time of her return, in her thirteenth year.

It is to the struggling father that this triumph of pedagogue workmanship must be chiefly ascribed. That these six years were years of difficulty and struggle to the poor scholar, who had to turn his classical lore into bread for his wife and increasing family, is sufficiently indicated by the wandering nature of the life in which they were passed. From Venice to Vicenza, and from Vicenza to Cesena,[44] the poor pedlar pedagogue had to hawk his learned wares, and drive a very uphill trade. For though learning in many cases enriched its professors in those days in such sort as might excite the envy of their successors in our own, this was always the result of princely patronage. That Jenkins in Belgrave Square received more than the value of a curacy is small comfort to starving flunkies out of place. Between living in clover as the retainer of some lay or ecclesiastical grandee, and finding it very difficult to live at all, there can have been hardly any middle path for a sixteenth–century scholar, whose erudition was his patrimony. And then again, though the poor scholar was a character well enough known through Europe from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, a poor scholar with a wife and family was a modern anomaly in 1533. And such incumbrances fatally put him out of the way of profiting by any of those small aids which the charities of that day, in accordance with its modes of life, afforded towards keeping together the body and soul of many an indigent "clerk."

CELIO CURIONE.

But through all the vicissitudes of these hard six years, Morato pursued unflinchingly the dear object of his heart, to make his Olympia—the apple of his eye, whose precocious talents had already awakened all the pride and ambition of the pedagogue father's bosom—a perfect specimen of classical training.

Among the towns visited by Morato during these years of exile, was Vercelli, in Piedmont; and there he formed a friendship with one who was destined to exercise an important influence over his future life and that of Olympia. This was Celio Secondo Curione, whose acts of overt dissidence from the Church had even then made him an object of persecution. Having become wholly alienated from Rome by the study of the Bible, and of certain of the writings of Melancthon, he was about escaping into Germany, when he was arrested, and thrown into prison by the Bishop of Ivrea. At the intercession of a relative, he was released, on condition of entering a monastery. There he finally made the breach between himself and the Church irreparable, by an act of audacity, which seems to have been more calculated to produce a theatrical and epigrammatic effect, than to bring about any useful result. Having quietly one day removed the relics from the high altar of the convent church, he installed the Bible in their place; thus indicating, more significantly probably than he intended, the tendency of the new Church then springing into existence, to substitute a new idolatry, less gross perhaps than that which it strove to supplant, but equally destined to impede for long ages the progress of mankind to a higher and purer theology.

Having fled to escape the consequences of this daring practical protest, he committed, in Milan, about 1530, the yet more unpardonable outrage of marrying a wife. Being by this act finally cast adrift upon the world, with increased responsibilities and necessities, he sought to obtain wherewithal to live, by publicly teaching the learned languages and literature. He did this with such success, as to attain not only that, but a very wide–spread reputation also, under circumstances which made obscurity most desirable for his safety. Driven, accordingly, from his occupation by the pursuit of his enemies, and yielding to a strong desire to revisit his native Piedmont, he appears, while travelling in that direction, to have fallen in with Morato at Vercelli, and to have been received by his brother exile and scholar in his temporary dwelling.

They did not part till there had been time for a friendship of the most intimate kind to spring up between them. And though, doubtless, there was plenty of congenial conversation between them on topics of classical lore,—on the disputed authenticity of Cicero's rhetoric, or the right interpretation of a passage of Plato,—we may be very sure, that the talk which most served to bind them to each other was on far more burning questions; on subjects which it was dangerous to touch, but which it had already become impossible for their minds to leave unprobed,—subjects, in speaking of which, either felt in his heart, that each cautious word, that moved a beam of doctrine but a hair's–breadth, might bring down a whole superincumbent fabric of venerated creed–edifice in ruin; subjects, too, in the discussion of which, the man who poured light into his neighbour's mind, was thereby exposing him to danger in life and goods,—a danger proportioned to the temperament of the mind enlightened.

FIRST RELIGIOUS IMPRESSIONS.