parting, saw as it went the re-establishment
of altars to beauty. In the midst of feudal barbarism, at an hour when
France was squalid, Germany uncouth, when English nobles could barely
read, when Europe generally had a contempt for letters which was not due
to any familiarity with them, but when Italy--a century in advance of
other lands--was merely corrupt, at that hour, the wraiths of Greece
mingling with the ghosts of Rome, made the mistress of the old world
sovereign of the new. Not in might but in art and intellect, again the
Eternal City ruled supreme.

From the annals of the epoch bravi peer and swarm--soldati di gran
diavolo, men more fiendish than animal, artists that contrived to drape
the abominable with cloths which, if crimson, were also of gold; poets
refined by generations of scrupulous polish but disorganized by a form of
corruption that was the more unholy in that it proceeded not from the
senses but the mind.

For centuries luxury had been reaccumulating about them. To it, after the
fall of Byzance, an unterrified spirit of beauty came. In between was a
sense of equality, one that a recently discovered hemisphere was to
assimilate, but which meanwhile enabled a man of brains to rise from
nowhere to anything, permitting a mercer to breed popes and an apothecary
Lorenzo the Magnificent. These factors, generally unconsidered, induced a
tone that could change instantly from the suave to the tragic, the tone of
a people that had no beliefs except in genius and no prejudices except
against stupidity, a tone ethically nul and intellectually great, the only
imaginable one that could produce combinations artistic and viperish as
the Borgias, aesthetic and vulperine as the Medici. Monsters such as they,
did not astonish. Columbus, in enlarging the earth, and Copernicus in
unveiling the skies, had so astounded that the ability to be surprised was
lost. Men could only admire and create.

These occupations were not hindered by the pontiffs. What the latter were,
diarists and historians--Infessura and Gregorovius--have told. As their
pages turn, pagan Rome revives. The splendid palaces had crumbled, the
superb porticoes were dust. The victorious eagles of the victorious
legions had flown to their eyries forever. The shouting throngs, the ivory
chariots, the baths of perfume and of blood, these things long since had
vanished. There were friars where gladiators had been, pifferari in lieu
of augurs, imperias instea