Muret, the Humanist, may perhaps be regarded as a typical example of the nature and fate of the superior invert of the Renaissance.  Born in 1526 at Muret (Limousin), of poor but noble family, he was of independent, somewhat capricious character, unable to endure professors, and consequently he was mainly his own teacher, though he often sought advice from Jules-Cesar Scaliger.  Muret was universally admired in his day for his learning and his eloquence, and is still regarded not only as a great Latinist and a fine writer, but as a notable man, of high intelligence, and remarkable, moreover, for courtesy in polemics in an age when that quality was not too common.  His portrait shows a somewhat coarse and rustic but intelligent face.  He conquered honor and respect before he died in 1585, at the age of 59.  In early life Muret wrote wanton erotic poems to women which seem based on personal experience.  But in 1553 we find him imprisoned in the Chatelet for sodomy and in danger of his life, so that he thought of starving himself to death.  Friends, however, obtained his release and he settled in Toulouse.  But the very next year he was burnt in effigy in Toulouse, as a Huguenot and sodomist, this being the result of a judicial sentence which had caused him to flee from the city and from France.  Four years later he had to flee from Padua owing to a similar accusation.  He had many friends but none of them protested against the charge, though they aided him to escape from the penalty.  It is very doubtful whether he was a Huguenot, and whenever in his works he refers to pederasty it is with strong disapproval.  But his writings reveal passionate friendship for men, and he seems to have expended little energy in combating a charge which, if false, was a shameful injustice to him.  It was after fleeing into Italy and falling ill of a fever from fatigue and exposure that Muret is said to have made the famous retort (to the physician by his bedside who had said:  “Faciamus experimentum in anima vili"):  “Vilem animam appellas pro qua Christus non dedignatus est mori."[56]

A greater Humanist than Muret, Erasmus himself, seems as a young man, when in the Augustinian monastery of Stein, to have had a homosexual attraction to another Brother (afterward Prior) to whom he addressed many passionately affectionate letters; his affection seems, however, to have been unrequited.[57]

As the Renaissance developed, homosexuality seems to become more prominent among distinguished persons.  Poliziano was accused of pederasty.  Aretino was a pederast, as Pope Julius II seems also to have been.  Ariosto wrote in his satires, no doubt too extremely:—­

    “Senza quel vizio son pochi umanisti."[58]

Tasso had a homosexual strain in his nature, but he was of weak and feminine constitution, sensitively emotional and physically frail.[59]