of pain, then no Spaniard surpassed him in the ingenuity of his devices.  In gratifying his thirst for vengeance he was never contented with mere murder.  To obtain a personal triumph at the expense of his enemy by the display of superior cunning, by rendering him ridiculous, by exposing him to mental as well as physical anguish, by wounding him through his affections or his sense of honor, was the end which he pursued.  This is why so many acts of violence in Italy assumed fantastic forms.  Even the country folk showed an infernal art in the execution of their vendette.  To serve the flesh of children up to their fathers at a meal of courtesy is mentioned, for example, as one mode of wreaking vengeance in country villages.  Thus the high culture and aesthetic temperament of the Italians gave an intellectual quality to their vices.  Crude lust and bloodshed were insipid to their palates:  they required the pungent sauce of a melodramatic catastrophe.

[1] Those who wish to gain a lively notion of Spanish cruelty in Italy should read, besides the accounts of the Sacco di Roma by Guicciardini and Buonaparte, the narrative of the Sacco di Prato in the Archivio Storico Italiano, vol. i., and Cagnola’s account of the Spanish occupation of Milan, ib. vol. iii.

    [2] De Comines more than once notices the humanity shown by the
    Italian peasants to the French army.

The drunkenness and gluttony of northern nations for a like reason found no favor in Italy.  It disgusted the Romans beyond measure to witness the swinish excesses of the Germans.  Their own sensuality prompted them to a refined Epicureanism in food and drink; on this point, however, it must be admitted that the prelates, here as elsewhere foremost in profligacy, disgraced the age of Leo with banquets worthy of Vitellius.[1] We trace the same play of the fancy, the same promptitude to quicken and intensify the immediate sense of personality at any cost of after-suffering, in another characteristic vice of the Italians.  Gambling among them was carried further and produced more harm than it did in the transalpine cities.  This we gather from Savonarola’s denunciations, from the animated pictures drawn by Alberti in his Trattato della Famiglia and Cena della Famiglia and also from the inductions to many of the Sacre Rappresentazioni.[2]

    [1] See Gregorovius, Stadt Rom, vol. viii. p. 225:  ’E li
    cardinali comenzarono a vomitar e cussi li altri,’ quoted from
    Sanudo.

    [2] One of the excellent characteristics of Alfonso the Great
    (Vespasiano, p. 49) was his abhorrence of gambling.