In what concerns social morality it would be almost impossible to define the position of the proletariate, tillers of the soil, and artisans, at this epoch.  These classes vary in their goodness and their badness, in their drawbacks and advantages, from age to age far less than those who mold the character of marked historical periods by culture.  They enjoy indeed a greater or a smaller immunity from pressing miseries.  They are innocent or criminal in different degrees.  But the ground-work of humanity in them remains comparatively unaltered; and their moral qualities, so far as these may be exceptional, reflect the influences of an upper social stratum.  It is clear from the histories related in this chapter that members of the lowest classes were continually mixing with the nobles and the gentry in the wild adventures of that troubled century.  They, like their betters, were undergoing a tardy metamorphosis from mediaeval to modern conditions, retaining vices of ferocity and grossness, virtues of loyalty and self-reliance, which belonged to earlier periods.  They, too, were now infected by the sensuous romance of pietism, the superstitious respect for sacraments and ceremonial observances which had been wrought by the Catholic Revival into ecstatic frenzy.  They shared those correlative yearnings after sacrilegious debauchery, felt those allurements of magic arts, indulged that perverted sense of personal honor which constituted psychological disease in the century which we are studying.  It can, moreover, be maintained that Italian society at no epoch has been so sharply divided into sections as that of the feudalized races.  In this period of one hundred years, from 1530 to 1630, when education was a privilege of the few, and when Church and princes combined to retard intellectual progress, the distinction between noble and plebeian, burgher and plowman, though outwardly defined, was spiritually and morally insignificant.  As in the Renaissance, so now, vice trickled downwards from above, infiltrating the masses of the people with its virus.  But now, even more decidedly than then, the upper classes displayed obliquities of meanness, baseness, intemperance, cowardice, and brutal violence, which are commonly supposed to characterize villeins.

I had thought to throw some light upon the manners of the Italian proletariate by exploring the archives of trials for witchcraft.  But I found that these were less common than in Germany, France, Spain, and England at a corresponding period.  In Italy witchcraft, pure and simple, was confined, for the most part, to mountain regions, the Apennines of the Abruzzi, and the Alps of Bergamo and Tyrol.[243] In other provinces it was confounded with crimes of poisoning, the procuring of abortion, and the fomentation of conspiracies in private families.  These facts speak much for the superior civilization of the Italian people considered as a whole.  We discover a common fund of intelligence, vice, superstition, prejudice, enthusiasm, craft,