the Puritan
Commonwealth, the Restoration, the Victorian Age.

The sixteenth century was a time when morals were perhaps not much
worse than they are now, but when vice and crime were more flaunted and
talked about. Puritanism and prudery have nowadays done their best to
conceal the corruption and indecency beneath the surface. But our
ancestors had no such delicacy. The naive frankness of the age, both
when it gloried in the flesh and when it reproved sin, gives a
full-blooded complexion to that time that is lacking now. The large
average consumption of alcohol--a certain irritant to moral
maladies--and the unequal administration of justice, with laws at once
savage and corruptly dispensed, must have had bad consequences.

The Reformation had no permanent discernible {504} effect on moral
standards. Accompanied as it often was with a temporary zeal for
righteousness, it was too often followed by a breaking up of
conventional standards and an emphasis on dogma at the expense of
character, that operated badly. Latimer thought that the English
Reformation had been followed by a wave of wickedness. Luther said
that when the devil of the papacy had been driven out, seven other
devils entered to take its place, and that at Wittenberg a man was
considered quite a saint who could say that he had not broken the first
commandment, but only the other nine. Much of this complaint must be
set down to disappointment at not reaching perfection, and over against
it may be set many testimonies to the moral benefits assured by the
reform.

[Sidenote: Violence]

It was an age of violence. Murder was common everywhere. On the
slightest provocation a man of spirit was expected to whip out a rapier
or dagger and plunge it into his insulter. The murder of unfaithful
wives was an especial point of honor. Benvenuto Cellini boasts of
several assassinations and numerous assaults, and he himself got off
without a scratch from the law, Pope Paul III graciously protesting
that "men unique in their profession, like Benvenuto, were not subject
to the laws." The number of unique men must have been large in the
Holy City, for in 1497 a citizen testified that he had seen more than a
hundred bodies of persons foully done to death thrown into the Tiber,
and no one bothered about it.

[Sidenote: Brigandage]

Brigandage stalked unabashed through the whole of Europe. By 1585 the
number of bandits in the papal states alone had risen to 2