They were at the same time both indifferent to opinion and self-conscious in a high degree.

The very worst of them was seen at a glance and recorded with minute particularity.

The depravity of less cultivated races remained unnoticed because no one took the trouble to describe mere barbarism.[1] Vices of the same sort, but less widely dispersed, perhaps, throughout the people, were notorious in Italy, because they were combined with so much that was beautiful and splendid.

In a word, the faults of the Italians were such as belong to a highly intellectualized society, as yet but imperfectly penetrated with culture, raised above the brutishness of barbarians, but not advanced to the self-control of civilization, hampered by the corruption of a Church that trafficked in crime, tainted by uncritical contact with pagan art and literature, and emasculated by political despotism.

Their vices, bad as they were in reality, seemed still worse because they attacked the imagination instead of merely exercising the senses.