The daisies of the golden year are dead,
Its sunsets will not touch the west again,
Its glories are removed, its blessings fled,
And only fully known when sought in vain;
The same sweet voices I shall never hear,
For the fair forms that once my pathway crossed
Are gone, with waters of the golden year
That now are mingled in the sea and lost.

VITTORIA ACCORAMBONI.
A TRUE ITALIAN HISTORY. IN NINE CHAPTERS.

CHAPTER I. GOING UP TO TOWN TO BE
"BROUGHT OUT."

IT was in the last quarter of that stormy and
many-coloured sixteenth century — time of
"renaissance" we call it, but a time of universal
dissolution and near approaching end of all things,
as it appeared to the Tribulation-mongers of that
day — that the following facts occurred. They
really DID occur. No filling in of historical outline
with lights and shadows of fictitious detail,
and no heightening of colour for the sake of
effect, shall be attempted in this narrative; the
reader is invited to receive the tale as a piece of
well-authenticated history: showing, somewhat
strikingly, how the world went in the good old
times three hundred years ago.

There lived in the remote little city of Gubbio
an ancient but obscure family of provincial
nobles, named Accoramboni. Gubbio, in its
pleasant niche at the western foot of that part
of the Apennines which crosses the province of
the ecclesiastical state called the Marches, was
a long way from Rome— a longer way, taking
all the difficulties of the journey into account,
than London is now-a-days. And in proportion
to its distance from Rome, the centre of life,
wealth, honour, preferment, and all good things,
despite its ante-Roman Etrurian reminiscences,
and other claims to respect, was life at Gubbio
stagnant and obscure. The sun, to use Queen
Dido's metaphor, yoked his team very far away
from the quiet little city under the Apennines.
Count Claudio Accoramboni and his countess,
however, might have been content to live and
die, and make their wine and press their olives
on the paternal acres, as a long line of
unrecorded Accorambonis had done before them, had
they not chanced to have a daughter, who grew
in this rustic retirement so rare a perfection
of loveliness and grace, that her parents felt it
to be their duty to the dear girl to give her
a few seasons in town. In fact, Vittoria Accoramboni
was rightly judged by her judicious
parents to be far too superior an article for the
native Gubbio market.

All the chroniclers — and they are many — who
have left records of Vittoria and her eventful
history, vie with each other in their enthusiastic
accounts of her surpassing beauty. And yet
this, we are assured, was but one portion of the
irresistible charm with which she enchanted all
who came within the sphere of her influence.
One grave old monk writes—crossing himself,
one may fancy, the while — of the "portentous
power of attraction" which her tongue exercised
when she spoke. Others speak of the inimitable
grace of her movements, the sylph-like perfection
of her form, her artless elegance, and entire
freedom from all affectation. Her talents, too,
were no less admirable than her beauty. She
was a poetess; and if the productions of her
muse, whether printed or preserved in manuscript,
cannot be said to be much read by her
countrymen of the present generation, yet they
sufficed to obtain a place for her name in the
huge volumes of the literary historians of her
country. Quadrio, Tiraboschi, Mazzuchelli, and
the others, all have a niche in their Pantheons
for the fairest of their host of songstresses.

It has often been remarked that the wide
differences of social habits, and still more of
moral feeling, which exist between one age and
social system and another, make it exceedingly
difficult for us duly to appreciate and understand
the life of the middle ages, and to estimate fairly
the characters of its actors. And, doubtless, the
entire difference of our own practice and modes
of thought with respect to such matters must
have the effect of making the conduct of Count
Claudio Accoramboni and his wife, in this business
of the disposal of their peerless daughter
to the best advantage, seem altogether strange
and unnatural. As soon as ever her surpassing
beauty, and rare endowments of mind and body,
manifested themselves, Vittoria seems to have
been considered by this sixteenth century family
as a valuable piece of marketable property, to
be disposed of in such manner as would produce
the greatest amount of advantage to the family.
The means adopted to this end, and the differences
of opinion on the subject between various
members of the family, will further illustrate the
enormous difference of our own ways of thinking
and acting on such subjects.

Rome, of course, was the only market for such
merchandise as Count Claudio had to offer for
sale; and to Rome, accordingly, the Accoramboni
family removed. Vittoria had a good escort
on her long and far from safe journey to the
capital of the world; for, besides father and
mother, four adult brothers accompanied her—
remarkably noble and needy youths, all trusting
to Vittoria, the family treasure, to open for
them some of the numerous roads to fortune,
which in those days all converged on the Papal
city.

This wonderful Rome had still in the sixteenth
century very legitimate pretensions to take rank
as the capital of the civilised world. The authority
which the popes claimed over all the civil
powers of Christendom, and which, though often
rebelled against in practice, was still admitted
almost universally in theory, caused their capital
to be the centre of all the political intrigues and
schemes of Europe; caused it to be perpetually
thronged with ambassadors and diplomatists of
every grade, with petitioners, adventurers, fortune-
hunters, and notabilities of every sort from
every part of the world. Most of the special
peculiarities which stamped the age with its own
social character existed in a concentrated degree