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, devotion, self-assertion,
possessed by the race at large. Only in districts remote from civil life
did witchcraft assume those anti-social and repulsive features which are
familiar to Northern nations. Elsewhere it penetrated, as a subtle
poison, through society, lending its supposed assistance to passions
already powerful enough to work their own accomplishment. It existed,
not as an endemic disease, a permanent delirium of maddened peasants,
but as a weapon in the arsenal of malice on a par with poisons and
provocatives to lust.

I might illustrate this position by the relation of a fantastic attempt
made against the life of Pope Urban VIII.[244]

[Footnote 243: Dandolo's _Streghe Tirolesi_, and Cantu's work on the
Diocese of Como show how much Subalpine Italy had in common in Northern
Europe in this matter.]

[Footnote 244: See _Rassegna Settimanale_, September 18, 1881.]

Giacomo Centini, the nephew of Cardinal d'Ascoli, fostered a fixed idea,
the motive of his madness being the promotion of his uncle to S. Peter's
Chair. In 1633 he applied to a hermit, who professed profound science in
the occult arts and close familiarity with demons. The man, in answer to
Giacomo's inquiries, said that Urban had still many years to live, that
the Cardinal d'Ascoli would certainly succeed him, and that he held it
in his power to shorten the Pope's days. He added that a certain Fra
Ch