roduced a schism between this superstition and morality.

[1] _Discorsi_, i. 27. This episode in Gianpaolo Baglioni's
life may be illustrated by the curious story told about Gabrino
Fondulo, the tyrant of Cremona. The Emperor Sigismund and Pope
John XXIII. were his guests together in the year 1414. Part of
their entertainment consisted in visiting the sights of Cremona
with their host, who took them up the great Tower (396 feet
high) without any escort. They all three returned safely, but
when Gabrino was executed at Milan in 1425, he remarked that he
only regretted one thing in the course of his life--namely,
that he had not pitched Pope and Emperor together from the
Torazzo. What a golden opportunity to have let slip! The story
is told by Antonio Campo, _Historia di Cremona_ (Milan, 1645),
p. 114.

While the Church was thus gradually deviating more and more directly
from the Christian ideal, and was exhibiting to Italy an ensample of
worldliness and evil living, the Italians, earlier than any other
European nation, had become imbued with the spirit of the ancient world.
Instead of the Gospel and the Lives of the Saints, men studied Plutarch
and Livy with avidity. The tyrannicides of Greece and the suicides of
the Roman Empire, patriots like Harmodius and Brutus, philosophers like
Seneca and Paetus Thrasea, seemed to the humanists of the fifteenth
century more admirable than the martyrs and confessors of the faith.
Pagan virtues were strangely mingled with confused and ill-assimilated
precepts of the Christian Church, while pagan vices wore a halo borrowed
from the luster of the newly found and passionately welcomed poets of
antiquity. Blending the visionary intuitions of the Middle Ages with the
positive and mundane ethics of the ancients, the Italians of the
Renaissance strove to adopt the sentiments and customs of an age long
dead and not to be resuscitated. At the same time the rhetorical taste
of the nation inclined the more adventurous and passionate natures to
seek glory by dramatic exhibitions of personal heroism. The Greek ideal
of [Greek: _to ealon_], the Roman conception of _Virtus_, agitated the
imagination of a people who had been powerfully influenced by professors
of eloquence, by public orators, by men of letters, masters in the arts
of style and of parade. Painting and sculpture, and that magnificence of
public life which characterized the fifteenth