high
and strict morality. In these early Italian cities a case of in'
fidelity is punished ruthlessly; the lover banished or killed; the wife
for ever lost to the world, perhaps condemned to solitude and a
lingering death in the fever tracts, like Pia dei Tolomei. A complacent
deceived husband is even more ridiculous (the deceived husband is
notoriously the chief laughing stock of all mediaeval free towns) than is
a jealous husband among the authorized and recognized _cicisbeos_ of a
feudal court. Indeed the respect for marriage vows inevitable in this
busy democratic mediaeval life is so strong, that long after the
commonwealths have turned into despotisms, and every social tie has been
dissolved in the Renaissance, the wives and daughters of men stained
with every libidinous vice, nay, of the very despots themselves
--Tiberiuses and Neros on a smaller scale--remain spotless in the midst
of evil; and authorized adultery begins in Italy only under the Spanish
rule in the late sixteenth century.

Such were the manners and morals of the Italian commonwealths when,
about the middle of the thirteenth century, the men of Tuscany, now free
and prosperous, suddenly awoke to the consciousness that they had a soul
which desired song, and a language which was spontaneously singing. It
was the moment when painting was beginning to claim for the figures of
real men and women the walls and vaulted spaces whence had hitherto
glowered, with vacant faces and huge ghostlike eyes, mosaic figures,
from their shimmering golden ground; the moment when the Pisan artists
had sculptured solemnly draped madonnas and kings not quite unworthy of
the carved sarcophagi which stood around them; the moment when, merging
together old Byzantine traditions and Northern examples, the architects
of Florence, Siena, and Orvieto conceived a style which made cathedrals
into marvellous and huge reliquaries of marble, jasper, alabaster, and
mosaics. The mediaeval flowering time had come late, very late, in Italy;
but the atmosphere was only the warmer, the soil the richer, and Italy
put forth a succession of exquisite and superb immortal flowers of art
when the artistic sap of other countries had begun to be exhausted. But
the Italians, the Tuscans, audacious in the other arts, were diffident
of themselves with regard to poetry. Architecture, painting, sculpture,
had been the undisputed field for plebeian craftsmen, belonging
exclusively to the free burghs an