What! art thou Italian, and dost thou not know, by instinct, that I spoke of the rhyme of Petrarch ?" 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.