or
the avoidance of peril an enhancement of pleasure to the Italians. This
is perhaps one of the reasons why all the imaginative compositions of
the Renaissance, especially the _Novelle,_ turn upon adultery. Judging
by the majority of these romances, by the comedies of the time, and by
the poetry of Ariosto, we are compelled to believe that such illicit
love was merely sensual, and owed its principal attractions to the scope
it afforded for whimsical adventures. Yet Bembo's _Asolani,_
Castiglione's panegyric of Platonic Love, and much of the lyrical poetry
in vogue warn us to be cautious. The old romantic sentiment expressed by
the Florentines of the thirteenth century still survived to some extent,
adding a sort of dignity in form at least to these affections.

[1] Much might be written about the play of the imagination
which gave a peculiar complexion to the profligacy, the
jealousy, and the vengeance of the Italians. I shall have
occasion elsewhere to maintain that in their literature at
least the Italians were not a highly imaginative race; nor were
they subject to those highly wrought conditions of the brooding
fancy, termed by the northern nations Melancholy, which Duerer
has personified in his celebrated etching, and Burton has
described in his _Anatomy._ But in their love and hatred, their
lust and their cruelty, the Italians required an intellectual
element which brought the imaginative faculty into play.

It was due again in a great measure to their demand for imaginative
excitement in all matters of the sense, to their desire for the
extravagant and extraordinary as a seasoning of pleasure, that the
Italians came to deserve so terrible a name among the nations for
unnatural passions.[1] This is a subject which can hardly be touched in
passing: yet the opinion may be recorded that it belongs rather to the
science of psychopathy than to the chronicle of vulgar lusts. English
poets have given us the right key to the Italian temperament, on this as
on so many other points. Shelley in his portrait of Francesco Cenci has
drawn a man in whom cruelty and incest have become appetites of the
distempered soul; the love of Giovanni and Annabella in Ford's tragedy
is rightly depicted as more imaginative than sensual. It is no excuse
for the Italians to say that they had spiritualized abominable vices.
What this really means is that their immorality was nearer that of
devils th