It is as though the whole race had put on mourning for its loss of liberty, its servitude to foreign tyrants and ecclesiastical hypocrites.

Nor is it fanciful to detect a note of moral sadness and mental depression corresponding to these black garments in the faces of that later generation.

How different is Tasso's melancholy grace from Ariosto's gentle joyousness; the dried-up precision of Baroccio's Francesco Maria della Rovere from the sanguine joviality of Titian's first duke of that name! One of the most acutely critical of contemporary poets felt the change which I have indicated, and ascribed it to the same cause.

Campanella wrote as follows: Black robes befit our age.

Once they were white; Next many-hued; now dark as Afric's Moor, Night-black, infernal, traitorous, obscure, Horrid with ignorance and sick with fright.
For very shame we shun all colors bright, Who mourn our end--the tyrants we endure, The chains, the noose, the lead, the snares, the lure-- Our dismal heroes, our souls sunk in night.
In the midst of this mirth-making there arrived on March 20 an embassy from England, announcing Henry VIII.'s resolve to divorce himself at any cost from Katharine of Aragon.