[1] For the Italian ethics of tyrannicide, see back, pp. 169,
    170.

    [2] See p. 166.

    [3] See p. 398.

    [4] It is printed in Arch.  Stor, vol. i.

[5] ’I am over-burdened with food, and I have eaten salt meats; so that I do not seem able to join my spirit to God....  God have pity on me, for they have burdened me with food.  Oh, how thoughtless of them!’ His words cannot be translated.  Naif in the extreme, they become ludicrous in English.

    [6] ’Ah, Luca, turn that Brutus out of my head, in order that I
    may take this last step wholly as a Christian man!’

To this narrative might be added the apology written by Lorenzino de’ Medici, after the murder of his cousin Alessandro in 1536.[1] He relies for his defense entirely upon arguments borrowed from Pagan ethics, and by his treatment of the subject vindicates for himself that name of Brutus with which Filippo Strozzi in person at Venice, and Varchi and Molsa in Latin epigrams, saluted him.  There is no trace of Christian feeling in this strong and splendid display of rhetorical ability; nor does any document of the age more forcibly exhibit the extent to which classical studies had influenced the morality of the Renaissance.  Lorenzino, however, when he wrote it, was not, like Boscoli, upon the point of dying.

[1] It is printed at the end of the third volume of Varchi, pp. 283-95; compare p. 210.  A medal in honor of Lorenzino’s tyrannicide was struck with a profile copied from Michael Angelo’s bust of Brutus.

The last thing to perish in a nation is its faith.  The whole history of the world proves that no anomalies are so glaring, no inconsistencies so paradoxical, as to sap the credit of a religious system which has once been firmly rooted in the habits, instincts, and traditions of a race:  and what remains longest is often the least rational portion.  Religions from the first are not the product of logical reflection or experiment, but of sentiment and aspiration.  They come into being as simple intuitions, and afterwards invade the province of the reason and assimilate the thought of centuries to their own conceptions.  This is the secret of their strength as well as the source of their weakness.  It is only a stronger enthusiasm, a new intuition, a fresh outburst of emotional vitality, that can supplant the old:—­

  ’Cotal rimedio ha questo aspro furore,
    Tale acqua suole spegner questo fuoco,
    Come d’asse si trae chiodo con chiodo.’

Criticism from without, internal corruption, patent absurdity, are comparatively powerless to destroy those habits of belief which once have taken hold upon the fancy and the feeling of a nation.  The work of dissolution proceeds in silence and in secret.  But the established order subsists until the moment comes for a new synthesis.  And in the sixteenth century the necessary impulse of regeneration was to come, not from Italy, satisfied with the serenity of her art, preoccupied with her culture, and hardened to the infamy of her corruption, but from the Germany of the barbarians she despised.