ble to describe mere barbarism.[1]
Vices of the same sort, but less widely dispersed, perhaps, throughout
the people, were notorious in Italy, because they were combined with so
much that was beautiful and splendid. In a word, the faults of the
Italians were such as belong to a highly intellectualized society, as
yet but imperfectly penetrated with culture, raised above the
brutishness of barbarians, but not advanced to the self-control of
civilization, hampered by the corruption of a Church that trafficked in
crime, tainted by uncritical contact with pagan art and literature, and
emasculated by political despotism. Their vices, bad as they were in
reality, seemed still worse because they attacked the imagination
instead of merely exercising the senses. As a correlative to their
depravity, we find a sobriety of appetite, a courtesy of behavior, a
mildness and cheerfulness of disposition, a widely diffused refinement
of sentiment and manners, a liberal spirit of toleration, which can
nowhere else be paralleled in, Europe at that period. It was no small
mark of superiority to be less ignorant and gross than England, less
brutal and stolid than Germany, less rapacious than Switzerland, less
cruel than Spain, less vain and inconsequent than France.

[1] Read, however, the Saxon Chronicles or the annals of
Ireland in Froude.

Italy again was the land of emancipated individuality. What Mill in his
Essay on Liberty desired, what seems every day more unattainable in
modern life, was enjoyed by the Italians. There was no check to the
growth of personality, no grinding of men down to match the average. If
great vices emerged more openly than they did elsewhere in Europe, great
qualities also had the opportunity of free development in heroes like
Ferrucci, in saints like Savonarola, in artists like Michael Angelo.
While the social atmosphere of the Papal and despotic courts was
unfavorable to the highest type of character, we find at least no
external engine of repression, no omnipotent inquisition, no
overpowering aristocracy.[1] False political systems and a corrupt
Church created a malaria, which poisoned the noble spirits of
Machiavelli, Ariosto, Guicciardini, Giuliano della Rovere. It does not,
however, follow therefore that the humanities of the race at large, in
spite of superstition and bad government, were vitiated.

[1] I am of course speaking of the Renaissance as distinguished
from that new phase of