tered a religious house. The fame of her poetical talents, which she continued to cultivate in her retirement, rendered her, at length, an object of celebrity and interest. The Duke of Orleans happened one day to repeat some of her verses to Margaret of Scotland, the first wife of Louis the Eleventh ; and that accomplished patroness of poetry and poets wrote her an invitation to attend her at court, which Clotilde modestly declined. The Queen then sent her, as a token of her admiration and friendship, a wreath of laurel, surmounted with a bouquet of daisies, (Marguèrites, in allusion to the name of both,) the leaves of which were wrought in silver and the flowers in gold, with this inscription: "Marguèrite d'Ecosse à Marguèrite d'Helicon." We are told that Alain Chartier, envious perhaps of these distinctions, wrote a satirical quatrain, in which he accused Clotilde of being deficient in l'air de cour, and that she replied to him, and defended herself in a very spirited rondeau. Nothing more is known of the life of this interesting woman, but that she had the misfortune to survive her son as well as her husband; and dying at the advanced age of ninety, in 1495, she was buried with them in the same tomb.* * Les Poëtes Français jusqu'à Malherbes, par Augin. A good edition of the works of Clotilde de Surville was published at Paris in 1802, and another in 1804. I believe both have become scarce. Her Poësies consist of pastorals, ballads, songs, epistles, and the fragment of an epic poem, of which the MS. is lost. Of her merit there is but one opinion. She is confessedly the greatest poetical genius which France could boast in a period of two hundred years; that is, from the decline of the Provençal poetry, till about 1500. 60 CHAPTER V. CONJUGAL POETRY CONTINUED. VITTORIA COLONNA. HALF a century later, we find the name of an Italian poetess, as interesting as our Clotilde de Surville, and far more illustrious. Vittoria Colonna was not thrown, with all her eminent gifts and captivating graces, among a rude people in a rude age; but all favourable influences, of time and circumstances, and fortune, conspired, with native talent, to make her as celebrated as she was truly admirable. She was the wife of that Marquis of Pescara, who has earned himself a name in the busiest and bloodiest page of history:-of that Pescara who commanded the armies of Charles the Fifth in Italy, and won the battle of Pavia, where Francis the First was taken prisoner. But great as was Pescara as a statesman and a military commander, he is far more interesting as the husband of Vittoria Colonna, and the laurels he reaped in the battle-field, are perishable and worthless, compared to those which his admirable wife wreathed around his brow. So thought Ariosto; who tell us, that if Alexander envied Achilles the fame he had acquired in the songs of Homer, how much more had he envied Pescara those strains in which his gifted consort had exalted his fame above that of all contemporary heroes? and not only rendered herself immortal; Col dolce stil, di che il miglior non odo, Trar dal sepolcro, e fa ch' eterno viva. He prefers her to Artemisia, for a reason rather quaintly expressed,— Anzi Tanto maggior, quanto è più assai bell' opra, Che por sotterra un uom, trarlo di sopra. "So much more praise it is, to raise a man above the earth, than to bury him under it." He compares her successively to all the famed heroines of Greece and Rome,-to Laodamia, to Portia, to Arria, to Argia, to Evadne,-who died with or for their husbands; and concludes, Quanto onore a Vittoria è più dovuto Che di Lete, e del Rio che nove volte In fact, at a period when Italy could boast of a constellation of female talent, such as never before or since adorned any one country at the same time, and besides a number of women accomplished in languages, philosophy, and the abstruser branches of learning, reckoned sixty poetesses, nearly contemporary, there was not one to be compared with Vittoria Colonna,-herself the theme of song; and upon whom her enthusiastic countrymen have lavished all the highsounding superlatives of a language, so rich in *Orlando Furioso, canto 37. |