ISABELLA D'ESTE.*
WE welcome this new edition of Mrs. Ady's attractive book ; perhaps the most attractive of her well-known studies
in Renaissance history and biography. It is as well printed and illustrated and almost as handsomely got up as the first edition, which appeared about thirteen years ago and was several times reprinted, and the comparatively low price ought to ensure it a good sale. While so many books of this kind have their short day—unfairly short, sometimes, considering the labour bestowed upon them—and are heard of no more, the demand for Mrs. Ady's books does not seem to slacken. Not that she is a great historian ; she would be the last, we fancy, to claim such distinction ; but she is a careful student, a sympathotie biographer, and an agreeable writer.
She knows how to give a picture or series of pictures of a special time, with all the details that bring it vividly before our eyes ; and also how to win our affection and interest for her central figure. Henrietta of Orleans, Beatrice d'Este, and others occur at once to our minds, not to mention less familiar person- ages such as Baldassare Castiglione, &a Many of us would
have to confess that we owe our clearest impressions of these characters in history to Mrs. Ady's well-painted portraits.
At the same time, it is possible to praise such work as this too highly, and to rely too much on its faithfulness. Mrs. Ady is often so entirely fascinated by her heroes and heroines that she takes too rose-coloured a view, not only of themselves, but of the world they lived in. Here is Isabella d'Este, the great Marchese, the wise politician, the blameless wife, the lover of
all beauty, the critic and patron of every branch of art, the
admired and flattered of every poet, prose-writer, painter, and musician of her time. There are few shadows on Mrs. Ady's
portrait of this amazing woman ; and though she warns us to judge Isabella d'Este by the standard of her own age, there is little indication throughout the volumes, with their descriptions of splendid revels and unmatched triumphs of art, of 'what that standard really was, of the darkness and cruelty that lay under- neath all that brilliant show, the hard-hearted selfishness which separated even the best people from their fellows, so that women like Isabella cared more for the possession of a beautiful statue than for the sufferings of their friends. Bembo called her " the wisest and most fortunate of women " ; but if ever there was a wisdom entirely of this world, and a fortune with no future, even in her own land and city, they were those of the famous Marchese who ruled Mantua in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
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