"To the most holy and undivided Trinity, to the humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ crucified, to the fruitful virginity of the most glorious Mary ever a Virgin, and to the company of all the saints, be given by every creature eternal praise, honour, power and glory, and to us the remission of all our sins.

These latter will have "closed his works far too promptly to discover that far from gainsaying the Catholic instinct which prefers virginity to marriage" (not a strictly accurate statement) he makes virginity a condition of the idealized marriage-relation, and finds its realization in her who was at once matron and virgin.

Nature, intoxicating her, shattering her will, seemed to have created a strange virginity in that body so familiar with the call of passion.

She has left her virginity as a relick of popery, and marries in her tribe without a ring.

Therein lay the royal beauty of woman, wife and mother; fruitful maternity triumphed over virginity by which life is slain.

Silvia here conjoins the unwholesome medieval ideal of virginity with the corrupt spectre of renaissance 'honour' quel vano Nome senza soggetto, Quell' idolo d' errori, idol d' inganno, (Coro I.) as Tasso himself styled itthat conventional mask so bitterly contrasted with the natural goodness of the age of gold.