ndulgence, keen sense of pleasure, and pagan
delight in physical beauty were interrupted at intervals by inexplicable
interludes of repentance, Bible-reading, psalm-singing, and visions. To
delineate Cellini will be the business of a distant chapter. The form of
the greatest of Italian preachers must occupy the foreground of the
next.

[1] I have thrown into an appendix some of the principal
passages from the chronicles about revivals in mediaeval Italy.

Before closing the imperfect and scattered notices collected in this
chapter, it will be well to attempt some recapitulation of the points
already suggested. Without committing ourselves to the dogmatism of a
theory, we are led to certain general conclusions on the subject of
Italian society in the sixteenth century. The fierce party quarrels
which closed the Middle Ages had accustomed the population to violence,
and this violence survived in the too frequent occurrence of brutal
crimes. The artificial sovereignty of the despots being grounded upon
perfidy, it followed that guile and fraud came to be recognized in
private no less than public life. With the emergence of the bourgeois
classes a self-satisfied positivism, vividly portrayed in the person of
Cosimo de' Medici, superseded the passions and enthusiasms of a previous
age. Thus force, craft, and practical materialism formed the basis of
Italian immorality. Vehement contention in the sphere of politics,
restless speculation, together with the loosening of every tie that
bound society together in the Middle Ages, emancipated personality and
substituted the freedom of self-centered vigor and virility (Virtu) for
the prescriptions of civil or religions order. In the nation that had
shaken off both Papal and Imperial authority no conception of law
remained to control caprice. Instead of law men obeyed the instincts of
their several characters, swayed by artistic taste or tyrannous
appetite, or by the splendid heroism of extinct antiquity. The Church
had alienated the people from true piety. Yet no new form of religious
belief arose; and partly through respect for the past, partly through
the convenience of clinging to existing institutions, Catholicism was
indulgently tolerated. At the same time the humanists introduced an
ideal antagonistic to Christianity of the monastic type. Without
abruptly severing themselves from the communion of the Church, and while
in form at least observing all its ordinances, the