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 century, contributed to the substitution of aesthetic for moral or religious standards.  Actions were estimated by the effect which they produced; and to sin against the laws of culture was of more moment than to transgress the code of Christianity.  Still, the men of the Renaissance could not forget the creed which they had drawn in with their mothers’ milk, but which the Church had not adjusted to the new conditions of the growing age.  The result was a wild phantasmagoric chaos of confused and clashing influences.

Of this peculiar moral condition the records of the numerous tyrannicides supply many interesting examples.[1] Girolamo Olgiati offered prayers to S. Ambrose for protection before he stabbed the Duke of Milan in S. Stephen’s Church.[2] The Pazzi conspirators, intimidated by the sanctity of the Florentine Duomo, had to employ a priest to wield the sacrilegious dagger.[3] Pietro Paolo Boscoli’s last confession, after the failure of his attempt to assassinate the Medici in 1513, adds further details in illustration of the