Ottavia.
Caviceo was far more agreeable to me since that day. Nor do I know the powerful desire that doth agitate my soul. I ignore what I long for, and cannot mention it. All I know is that Caviceo pleaseth me far more than all mortals; I expect from him alone the supreme pleasure which I do not understand, as I ignore what it may be like. I desire naught and yet desire....
Here we end our extract from Luisa’s Dialogues. We shall have occasion to quote from them again in subsequent volumes of Anthologica Rarissima.
EXCURSUS to THE SKIRMISH.
Nicolas Chorier, the author of the Dialogues of Luisa Sigea (the book is commonly called the Aloisia or the Meursius, after the name of the supposed author or translator) was born at Vienne, Dauphiny, in 1612; he received a law-doctor’s degree in 1639, and practised the profession of lawyer at the Court of Aids in his native town.[92] A man of cultivated mind, a passionate lover of letters, a first-rate Latinist, he devoted only a very limited part of his time to causes of the bar.
While passing out of the Jesuit Academy, and during the course of his law studies, he tried his hand at a variety of works both in French and Latin.... The composition of the Aloisia, or at least the first draft, for he must often have retouched this chief work, may be traced back to that time. “I wrote then,” he tells us in his Memoirs, “Epistles, Speeches, a Political Dissertation on the French alliance with the Ottoman Empire, and two Satires, the one Menippean, the other Sotadical.”[93] ... It was about the year 1660 that he had, according to all probability, the first edition of the Aloisia secretly printed in Lyons. The work was supposed to have been written in Spanish, in the 16th century, by an erudite young girl, Luisa Sigea, whose father, Jacques Sigée, a native of France, had quitted his country to settle down at Toledo. (Luisa Sigea, who was born at Toledo about the year 1530 and died in 1560, says the English translator in a note, knew Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic. She was styled the Minerva of her time.) The Spanish work was lost; but there remained a Latin manuscript translation of it, which Chorier, in order to secure himself, attributed to the learned Dutchman Joannes Meursius, dead twenty years before.... Chorier died in 1692; he left several manuscript works behind him, some of which have since been printed.
THE NIGHTINGALE.[94]
