At first the best minds of the nation fret and rebel, and meet with the dungeon or the stake as the reward of contumacy.

In the end everybody seems to be indifferent, satisfied with vacuity, enamored of insipidity.

The brightest episode in this dreary period is the emergence of modern music with incomparable sweetness and lucidity.
It must not be supposed that the change which I have adumbrated, passed rapidly over the Italian spirit.

When Paul III.

succeeded Clement on the Papal throne in 1534, some of the giants of the Renaissance still survived, and much of their great work was yet to be accomplished.
Michelangelo had neither painted the Last Judgment nor planned the cupola which crowns S.Peter's.