Culture was widely diffused without regard to rank or wealth.

Public edifices of colossal grandeur were multiplied.

Meanwhile the people at large were being fashioned to that self-conscious and intelligent activity which is fostered by the modes of life peculiar to political and social centers in a condition of continued rivalry and change.
Under the Italian despotisms we observe nearly the opposite of all the influences brought to bear in the same period upon the nations of the North.

There is no gradual absorption of the great vassals in monarchies, no fixed allegiance to a reigning dynasty, no feudal aid or military service attached to the tenure of the land, no tendency to centralize the whole intellectual activity of the race in any capital, no suppression of individual character by strongly biased public feeling, by immutable law, or by the superincumbent weight of a social hierarchy.

Everything, on the contrary, tends to the free emergence of personal passions and personal aims.