Seated by the open casement, through which the moonlight stole soft and sheen, with one lamp beside her, from which she seemed to shade her eyes, though in reality she sought to hide her countenance 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 ideal of love which she had formed.  She required some being round whom all her vainer qualities could rally; she felt that where she loved she must adore; she demanded no common idol before which to humble so strong and imperious a mind.  Unlike women of a gentler mould, who desire, for a short period, to exercise the caprices