worst of them was seen at a glance and recorded with minute particularity.  The depravity of less cultivated races remained unnoticed because no one took the trouble to describe mere barbarism.[1] Vices of the same sort, but less widely dispersed, perhaps, throughout the people, were notorious in Italy, because they were combined with so much that was beautiful and splendid.  In a word, the faults of the Italians were such as belong to a highly intellectualized society, as yet but imperfectly penetrated with culture, raised above the brutishness of barbarians, but not advanced to the self-control of civilization, hampered by the corruption of a Church that trafficked in crime, tainted by uncritical contact with pagan art and literature, and emasculated by political despotism.  Their vices, bad as they were in reality, seemed still worse because they attacked the imagination instead of merely exercising the senses.  As a correlative to their depravity, we find a sobriety of appetite, a courtesy of behavior, a mildness and cheerfulness of disposition, a widely diffused refinement of sentiment and manners, a liberal spirit of toleration, which can nowhere else be paralleled in, Europe at that period.  It was no small mark of superiority to be less ignorant and gross than England, less brutal and stolid than Germany, less rapacious than Switzerland, less cruel than Spain, less vain and inconsequent than France.

    [1] Read, however, the Saxon Chronicles or the annals of
    Ireland in Froude.

Italy again was the land of emancipated individuality.  What Mill in his Essay on Liberty desired, what seems every day more unattainable in modern life, was enjoyed by the Italians.  There was no check to the growth of personality, no grinding of men down to match the average.  If great vices emerged more openly than they did elsewhere in Europe, great qualities also had the opportunity of free development in heroes like Ferrucci, in saints like Savonarola, in artists like Michael Angelo.  While the social atmosphere of the Papal and despotic courts was unfavorable to the highest type of character, we find at least no external engine of repression, no omnipotent inquisition, no overpowering aristocracy.[1] False political systems and a corrupt Church created a malaria, which poisoned the noble spirits of Machiavelli, Ariosto, Guicciardini, Giuliano della Rovere.  It does not, however, follow therefore that the humanities of the race at large, in spite of superstition and bad government, were vitiated.

    [1] I am of course speaking of the Renaissance as distinguished
    from that new phase of Italian history which followed the
    Council of Trent and the Spanish despotism.