They all three returned safely, but when Gabrino was executed at Milan in 1425, he remarked that he only regretted one thing in the course of his life--namely, that he had not pitched Pope and Emperor together from the Torazzo.

What a golden opportunity to have let slip! The story is told by Antonio Campo, _Historia di Cremona_ (Milan, 1645), p.

114.
While the Church was thus gradually deviating more and more directly from the Christian ideal, and was exhibiting to Italy an ensample of worldliness and evil living, the Italians, earlier than any other European nation, had become imbued with the spirit of the ancient world.
Instead of the Gospel and the Lives of the Saints, men studied Plutarch and Livy with avidity.

The tyrannicides of Greece and the suicides of the Roman Empire, patriots like Harmodius and Brutus, philosophers like Seneca and Paetus Thrasea, seemed to the humanists of the fifteenth century more admirable than the martyrs and confessors of the faith.
Pagan virtues were strangely mingled with confused and ill-assimilated precepts of the Christian Church, while pagan vices wore a halo borrowed from the luster of the newly found and passionately welcomed poets of antiquity.

Blending the visionary intuitions of the Middle Ages with the positive and mundane ethics of the ancients, the Italians of the Renaissance strove to adopt the sentiments and customs of an age long dead and not to be resuscitated.