A pale life, vulgar cares, and monotonous duties for our Court–muse, so long accustomed to the flattering homage of a brilliant courtier circle in the splendid Ferrara saloons, glittering with gilding, and glowing with the colours of Dosso Dossi! The contrast must have presented itself sometimes to Olympia's mind; but the recollection was more calculated to produce a contented smile than a sigh of regret. It is a noticeable development of a richly endowed moral nature,—this change of one, who seemed so wholly and perfectly made and fitted for the element in which she then moved, into a being at least as thoroughly adapted to a life so violently contrasted to it in all ways.
Sometimes the perfect adaptation to her new position, as the learned wife of a distinguished professor, not without authority in her circle, shows itself amusingly in a little assumption of the birched Minerva attitude, to which, it has been hinted, she had a slight leaning. As when we find her writing to a divine,[110] whose name is discreetly left in blank, in this strain:
"As I have good information that your backslidings are frequent, I have thought it right to admonish you that you are acting in a manner at variance with the high dignity of your office, and disgraceful to your gray hairs, in giving way to your appetite as grossly as any Epicurus could do!" The gray–haired preacher, it would seem, was addicted to excessive potations; and Olympia's letter is long and eloquent enough on the subject to have mended his habits, if it was in the power of lecturing to do so.
Grünthler and his wife had hardly got settled at Schweinfurth before a very eligible appointment to a Professor's chair at Lintz was offered to him, through George Hermann. The position seemed to be all that could be desired, if only a favourably reply were returned to one question, which Olympia immediately writes[111] back to their kind friend and patron to ask. "Is anti–Christ raging at Lintz? Shall we be permitted, that is to say, to hold and to profess openly our own faith? Because, having been enlightened sufficiently to see and give testimony to the truth, our eternal happiness would be the price of any turning back from the plough."
