life
entirely the reverse of the life of feudal countries. The Italian cities
were communities of manufacturers and merchants, into which only
gradually, and at the sacrifice of every aristocratic privilege and
habit, a certain number of originally foreign feudatories were gradually
absorbed. Each community consisted of a number of mercantile families,
equal before the law, and illustrious or obscure according to their
talents or riches, whose members, instead of being scattered over a wide
area like the members of the feudal nobility, were most often gathered
together under one roof--sons, brothers, nephews, daughters, sisters and
daughters-in-law, forming a hierarchy attending to the business of
factory or counting-house under the orders of the father of the family,
and to the economy of the house-under the superintendence of the mother;
a manner of living at once business-like and patriarchal, expounded
pounded by the interlocutors in Alberti's "Governo della Famiglia," and
which lasted until the dissolution of the commonwealths and almost to
our own times. Such habits imply a social organization, an intercourse
between men and women, and a code of domestic morality the exact
opposite to those of feudal countries. Here, in the Italian cities,
there are no young men bound to loiter, far from their homes, round the
wife of a military superior, to whom her rank and her isolation from all
neighbours give idleness and solitude. The young men are all of them in
business, usually with their own kinsfolk; not in their employer's
house, but in his office; they have no opportunity of seeing a woman
from dawn till sunset. The women, on their side, are mainly employed at
home: the whole domestic arrangement depends upon them, and keeps their
hands constantly full; working, and working in the company of their
female relatives and friends. Men and women are free comparatively
little, and then they are free all together in the same places; hence no
opportunities for _tete-a-tete_. Early Italian poetry is fond of showing
us the young poet reading his verses or explaining his passion to those
gentle, compassionate women learned in love, of whom we meet a troop,
beautiful, vague, half-arch, half-melancholy faces, consoling Dante in
the "Vita Nuova," and reminding Guido Cavalcanti of his lady far off at
Toulouse. But such women almost invariably form a group; they cannot be
approached singly. Such a state of society inevitably produces a