_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