ational or national validity. These potentates were
ill-combined among themselves, and mutually jealous. On the other side
were ranged disruptive forces of the most heterogeneous kinds--remnants
from antique party-warfare, fragments of obsolete domestic feuds, new
strivings after freer life in mentally down-trodden populations,
blending with crime and misery and want and profligacy to compose an
opposition which exasperated despotism. These anarchical conditions were
due in large measure to the troubles caused by foreign campaigns of
invasion. They were also due to the Spanish type of manners imposed upon
the ruling classes, which the native genius accepted with fraudulent
intelligence, and to which it adapted itself by artifice. We must
further reckon the division between cultured and uncultured people,
which humanism had effected, and which subsisted after the benefits
conferred by humanism had been withdrawn from the race. The retirement
of the commercial aristocracy from trade, and their assumption of
princely indolence in this period of political stagnation, was another
factor of importance. But the truest cause of Italian retrogression
towards barbarism must finally be discerned in the sharp check given to
intellectual evolution by the repressive forces of the Counter-Reformation.

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

INDEX.

A

ACADEMIES, Italian, the flourishing time of, i. 52.

ACCIAIUOLI, Roberto, i. 33.

ACCOLTI, Benedetto, conspirator against Pius IV., i. 132.

ACCORAMBONI, Claudio (father of Vittoria), i. 356.

---Marcello (brother of Vittoria):
intrigues for the marriage of his sister with the
Duke of Bracciano, i. 358 _sqq._;
procures the murder of her husband, 362;
employs a Greek enchantress to brew love-philters, 365;
his death, 372.

---Tarquinia (mother of Vittoria), i. 356.

---Vittoria, the story of, i. 355 _sqq._;
her birth and parentage, 356;
marriage with Felice Peretti, 357;
intrigue with the Duke of Bracciano, 360;
the murder of her husband, 362;
her marriage with Bracciano, 364;
annulled by the Pope, 364, 366;
the union renounced by the Duke, 365;
put on trial for the murder of Peretti, _ib._;
their union publicly ratified by the Duke, 366;
flight from Rome, _ib._;
death of Bracciano, 367;
her murder procured by Lodovico Orsini, 369.

'ACTS of Faith,' i. 107, 176, 187.

ADMINISTRATOR, the (Jesuit functionary), i. 273.

'ADONE,' Marino's