ithout being morally supported; thus, little by little, moral feeling
became warped. This was already the case in Dante's day. Farinata is
condemned to the most horrible punishment, which to Dante seems just,
because in accordance with an accepted code; yet Dante cannot but admire
him and cannot really hate him, for there is nothing in him to hate; he
is a criminal and yet respected--fatal combination! Dante punishes
Francesca, Pier delle Vigne, and Brunetto Latini, but he shows no
personal horror of them; in the one case his moral instinct refrains
from censuring the comparatively innocent, in the other it has ceased to
revolt from the really infamous. Where Dante does feel real indignation,
is most often in cases unprovided for by the religious codes, as with
those low, grovelling, timid natures (the very same with whom
Machiavelli, the admirer of great villains, fairly loses patience),
those creatures whom Dante personally despises, whom he punishes with
filthy devices of his own, whom he passes by with words such as he never
addresses to Semiramis, Brutus, or Capaneus. This toleration of vice,
while acquiescing in its legal punishment, increased in proportion to
the development of individual judgment, and did not cease till all the
theories of the lawful and unlawful had been so completely demolished as
to permit of their being rebuilt on solid bases.

This work of demolition had not yet ceased in the beginning of the
sixteenth century; and the moral confusion due to it was increased by
various causes dependent on political and other circumstances. The
despots in whose hands it was the inevitable fate of the various
commonwealths to fall, were by their very position immoral in all their
dealings: violent, fraudulent, suspicious, and, from their life of
constant unnatural tension of the feelings, prone to every species of
depravity; while, on the other hand, in the feudal parts of Italy--which
had merely received a superficial Renaissance varnish imported from
other places with painters and humanists--in Naples, Rome, and the
greater part of Umbria and the Marches, the upper classes had got into
that monstrous condition which seems to have been the inevitable final
product of feudalism, and which, while it gave France her Armagnacs, her
Foix, and her Retz, gave Italy their counterparts in her hideously
depraved princelets, the Malatestas, Varanos, Vitelli, and Baglioni.
Both these classes of men, despots and feudal no