e: Ariosto, 1531] The former cared only for his fantastic
world of chivalry and faery, and when he did mention, in a satire
dedicated to Bembo, that Friar Martin had become a heretic as Nicoletto
had become an infidel, the reason in both cases is that they had
overstrained their intellects in the study of metaphysical theology,
"because when the mind soars up to see God it is no wonder that, it
falls down sometimes blind and confused." Heresy he elsewhere pictures
as a devastating monster.

{375} But there was a third reason why the Reformation could not
succeed in Italy, and that was that it could not catch the ear of the
common people. If for the churchman it was a heresy, and for the
free-thinker a superstition, for the "general public" of ordinarily
educated persons it was an aristocratic fad. Those who did embrace its
doctrines and read its books, and they were not a few of the
second-rate humanists, cherished it as their fathers had cherished the
neo-Platonism of Pico della Mirandola, as an esoteric philosophy. So
little inclined were they to bring their faith to the people that they
preferred to translate the Bible into better Greek or classical Latin
rather than into the vulgar Tuscan. And just at the moment when it
seemed as if a popular movement of some sort might result from the
efforts of the Reformers, or in spite of them, came the Roman
Inquisition and nipped the budding plant.

[Sidenote: Christian Renaissance]

But between the levels of the greatest intellectual leaders and that of
the illiterate masses, there was a surprising number of groups of men
and women more or less tinctured with the doctrines of the north. And
yet, even here, one must add that their religion was seldom pure
Lutheranism or Calvinism; it was Christianized humanism. There was the
brilliant woman Vittoria Colonna, who read with rapture the doctrine of
justification by faith, but who remained a conforming Catholic all her
life. There was Ochino, the general of the Capuchins, whose defection
caused a panic at Rome but who remained, nevertheless, an independent
rather than an orthodox Protestant. Of like quality were Peter Martyr
Vermigli, an exile for his faith, and Jerome Bolsec, a native of France
but an inhabitant of Ferrara, whence he took to Geneva an eccentric
doctrine that caused much trouble to Calvin. Finally, it was perfectly
in accordance with the Italian genius that the most radical of
Protestant dissenters,