creation, we are obliged to adore him, and are permitted to love him too at human distance.  ’Tis the nature of perfection to be attractive, but the excellency of the object refines the nature of the love.  It strikes an impression of awful reverence; ’tis indeed that love which is more properly a zeal than passion.  ’Tis the rapture which anchorites find in prayer, when a beam of the divinity shines upon them; that which makes them despise all worldly objects; and yet ’tis all but contemplation.  They are seldom visited from above, but a single vision so transports them, that it makes up the happiness of their lives.  Mortality cannot bear it often:  it finds them in the eagerness and height of their devotion; they are speechless for the time that it continues, and prostrate and dead when it departs.  That ecstacy had need be strong, which, without any end, but that of admiration has power enough to destroy all other passions.  You render mankind insensible to other beauties, and have destroyed the empire of love in a court which was the seat of his dominion.  You have subverted (may I dare to accuse you of it?) even our fundamental laws; and reign absolute over the hearts of a stubborn and free-born people, tenacious almost to madness of their liberty.  The brightest and most victorious of our ladies make daily complaints of revolted subjects, if they may be said to be revolted, whose servitude is not accepted; for your royal highness is too great, and too just a monarch, either to want or to receive the homage of rebellious fugitives.  Yet, if some few among the multitude continue stedfast to their first pretensions, ’tis an obedience so lukewarm and languishing, that it merits not the name of passion; their addresses are so faint, and their vows so hollow to their sovereigns, that they seem only to maintain their faith out of a sense of honour:  they are ashamed to desist, and yet grow careless to obtain.  Like despairing combatants, they strive against you as if they had beheld unveiled the magical shield of your Ariosto, which dazzled the beholders with too much brightness.  They can no longer hold up their arms; they have read their destiny in your eyes: 

Splende lo scudo, a guisa di piropo; E luce altra non e tanto lucente:  Cader in terra a lo splendor fu d’vopo, Con gli occhi abbacinati, e senza mente.

And yet, madam, if I could find in myself the power to leave this argument of your incomparable beauty, I might turn to one which would equally oppress me with its greatness; for your conjugal virtues have deserved to be set as an example, to a less degenerate, less tainted age.  They approach so near to singularity in ours, that I can scarcely make a panegyric to your royal highness, without a satire on many others.  But your person is a paradise, and your soul a cherubim within, to guard it.  If the excellence of the outside invite the beholders, the majesty of your mind deters them from too bold approaches, and turns