mainly the work of a select few.  It had transformed society without permeating the masses of the people.  Was it strange that the majority should reflect that, after all, the old ways are the best?  This led them to approve the Catholic Revival.  Was it strange that, after long distracting aimless wars, they should hail peace at any price?  This lent popular sanction to the Spanish hegemony, in spite of its obvious drawbacks.

These may be reckoned the main conditions which gave a peculiar but not easily definable complexion of languor, melancholy, and dwindling vitality to nearly every manifestation of Italian genius in the second half of the sixteenth century, and which well nigh sterilized that genius during the two succeeding centuries.  In common with the rest of Europe, and in consequence of an inevitable alteration of their mental bias, they had lost the blithe spontaneity of the Renaissance.  But they were at the same time suffering from grievous exhaustion, humiliated by the tyranny of foreign despotism, and terrorized by ecclesiastical intolerance.  In their case, therefore, a sort of moral and intellectual atrophy becomes gradually more and more perceptible.  The clear artistic sense of rightness and of beauty yields to doubtful taste.  The frank audacity of the Renaissance is superseded by cringing timidity, lumbering dulness, somnolent and stagnant acquiescence in accepted formulae.  At first the best minds of the nation fret and rebel, and meet with the dungeon or the stake as the reward of contumacy.  In the end everybody seems to be indifferent, satisfied with vacuity, enamored of insipidity.  The brightest episode in this dreary period is the emergence of modern music with incomparable sweetness and lucidity.

It must not be supposed that the change which I have adumbrated, passed rapidly over the Italian spirit.  When Paul III. succeeded Clement on the Papal throne in 1534, some of the giants of the Renaissance still survived, and much of their great work was yet to be accomplished.  Michelangelo had neither painted the Last Judgment nor planned the cupola which crowns S. Peter’s.  Cellini had not cast his Perseus for the Loggia de’Lanzi, nor had Palladio raised San Giorgio from the sea at Venice.  Pietro Aretino still swaggered in lordly insolence; and though Machiavelli was dead, the ‘silver histories’ of Guicciardini remained to be written.  Bandello, Giraldi and Il Lasca had not published their Novelle, nor had Cecchi given the last touch to Florentine comedy.  It was chiefly at Venice, which preserved the ancient forms of her oligarchical independence, that the grand style of the Renaissance continued to flourish.  Titian was in his prime; the stars of Tintoretto and Veronese had scarcely risen above the horizon.  Sansovino was still producing masterpieces of picturesque beauty in architecture.