[Footnote 142:  The original letter, printed by Dejob, op. cit. p. 491, is signed by Giustiniano Finetti, who seems to have been a professor of medicine in the Roman University.  His son, a youth of sixteen, complained that the students had demanded and obtained leave to recite a certain ‘lettione che era carnavalesca d’ano et de priapo,’ adding that they were in the habit of holding debates upon the thesis that (LATIN:  ’res sodcae erant praeferendae veneri naturali, et reprobabant rem veneream cum feminis ac audabant masturbationem.’) The dialogue which the students obtained leave publicly to recite was probably similar to one that might still be heard some years ago in spring upon the quays of Naples, and which appeared to have descended from immemorial antiquity.]

[Footnote 143:  The Latin text is printed in Renouard’s Imprimerie des Aldes, p. 473.]

To accuse the Church solely and wholly for this decay of humanistic learning in Italy would be uncritical and unjust.  We must remember that after a period of feverish energy there comes a time of languor in all epochs of great intellectual excitement.  Nor was it to be expected that the enthusiasm of the fifteenth century for classical studies should have been prolonged into the second half of the sixteenth century.  But we are justified in blaming the ecclesiastical and civil authorities of the Counter-Reformation for their determined opposition to the new direction which that old enthusiasm for the classics was now manifesting.  They strove to force the stream of learning backward into scholastic and linguistic channels, when it was already plowing for itself a fresh course in the fields of philosophical and scientific discovery.  They made study odious, because they attempted to restrain it to the out-worn husks of pedantry and rhetoric.  These, they thought, were innocuous.  But what the intellectual appetite then craved, the pabulum that it required to satisfy its yearning, was rigidly denied it.  Speculations concerning the nature of man and of the world, metaphysical explorations into the regions of dimly apprehended mysteries, physics, political problems, religious questions touching the great matters in dispute through Europe, all the storm and stress of modern life, the ferment of the modern mind and will and conscience, were excluded from the schools, because they were antagonistic to the Counter-Reformation.  Italy was starved and demoralized in order to avert a revolution; and learning was asphyxiated by confinement to a narrow chamber filled with vitiated and exhausted air.[144]

[Footnote 144:  As Sarpi says:  ’Of a truth the extraordinary rigor with which books are hunted out for extirpation, shows how vigorous is the light of that lantern which they have resolved to extinguish.’ Lettere, vol. i. p. 328.]