They, too, were now infected by the sensuous romance of pietism, the superstitious respect for sacraments and ceremonial observances which had been wrought by the Catholic Revival into ecstatic frenzy.

They shared those correlative yearnings after sacrilegious debauchery, felt those allurements of magic arts, indulged that perverted sense of personal honor which constituted psychological disease in the century which we are studying.

It can, moreover, be maintained that Italian society at no epoch has been so sharply divided into sections as that of the feudalized races.

In this period of one hundred years, from 1530 to 1630, when education was a privilege of the few, and when Church and princes combined to retard intellectual progress, the distinction between noble and plebeian, burgher and plowman, though outwardly defined, was spiritually and morally insignificant.

As in the Renaissance, so now, vice trickled downwards from above, infiltrating the masses of the people with its virus.