ual excesses of that time, although, or
perhaps because, celibacy as such has now become an enforced
institution. It is true, however, that the literature of a decaying
time, catering to corrupt tastes, furnishes to us sensational and
extraordinary cases of impurity, while it fails to record the numerous
instances of virtue, self-abnegation, and nobility.

An authority of first rank, AEnea Silvio Piccolomoni, later Pope Pius
II., transmits to us a glaring picture, with little light and much lurid
shadow, of Vienna as he saw it. We find there society of all ranks sadly
demoralized. The burghers invite to their houses vile carousers and
"light misses;" the common people are represented as steeped in
immorality and drink. Wives are rarely satisfied with one husband, and
the husbands knowing their shame are not specially pained by it. Gallant
nobles call on married burgher women, their husbands offer wine and then
leave them to themselves. Widows do not wait, even for decency's sake,
the expiration of the year of mourning before they remarry; rich old men
marry young girls, who then carry on adultery with their husband's
valets as they did before marriage. It happens not infrequently that
fathers or husbands who dare to disturb their daughters or wives in
their iniquities with the nobles are killed or poisoned. Such is AEneas
Silvio's account of Viennese society.

Similar stupefying pictures of social life in many other cities may be
gleaned from chronicles, history, and sermons. Debauch is constant and
appalling. In the thriving Hanseatic city of Luebeck we hear of
illustrious ladies masked by thick veils holding bestial orgies with
common sailors in the vilest drinking resorts. Again we read of the
great severity of the penal laws, and again we note their practical
inefficiency. The punishment for the crime of rape was death, usually by
decapitation, but in Suabia and Hessen the criminal was buried alive or
transfixed. The injured woman, however, to give legal force to her
accusation was required to announce her disgrace immediately by loud
screams and by the exhibition of dishevelled hair and torn garments. The
statutes vary, but all are harsh. Adulterers belonging to the lower
classes,--in the upper classes adultery was too common to be
punished,--when seized _in flagranti delicto_, were liable to be
decapitated or to be buried alive together. Incest was punishable by
confiscation of property; bigamy, by death. The pen