[1023] Ezzelino da Romano might be put first, were it not that he rather acted under the influence of ambitious motives and astrological delusions.
[1024] Giornali Napoletani, in Murat. xxi. col. 1092 ad a. 1425. According to the narrative this deed seems to have been committed out of mere pleasure in cruelty. Br., it is true, believed neither in God nor in the saints, and despised and neglected all the precepts and ceremonies of the Church.
[1025] Pii II. Comment. l. vii. p. 338.
[1026] Jovian. Pontan. De Immanitate, cap. 17, where he relates how Malatesta got his own daughter with child—and so forth.
[1027] Varchi, Storie Fiorentine, at the end. (When the work is published without expurgations, as in the Milanese edition.)
[1028] On which point feeling differs according to the place and the people. The Renaissance prevailed in times and cities where the tendency was to enjoy life heartily. The general darkening of the spirits of thoughtful men did not begin to show itself till the time of the foreign supremacy in the sixteenth century.
[1029] What is termed the spirit of the Counter-Reformation was developed in Spain some time before the Reformation itself, chiefly through the sharp surveillance and partial reorganisation of the Church under Ferdinand and Isabella. The principal authority on this subject is Gomez, Life of Cardinal Ximenes, in Rob. Belus, Rer. Hispan. Scriptores, 3 vols. 1581.
[1030] It is to be noticed that the novelists and satirists scarcely ever mention the bishops, although they might, under altered names, have attacked them like the rest. They do so, however, e.g. in Bandello, ii. nov. 45; yet in ii. 40, he describes a virtuous bishop. Gioviano Pontano in the Charon introduces the ghost of a luxurious bishop with a ‘duck’s walk.’
[1031] Foscolo, Discorso sul testo del Decamerone, ‘Ma dei preti in dignità niuno poteva far motto senza pericolo; onde ogni frate fu l’irco delle iniquita d’Israele,’ &c. Timotheus Maffeus dedicates a book against the monks to Pope Nicholas V.; Facius, De Vir. Ill. p. 24. There are specially strong passages against the monks and clergy in the work of Palingenius already mentioned iv. 289, v. 184 sqq., 586 sqq.
[1032] Bandello prefaces ii. nov. i. with the statement that the vice of avarice was more discreditable to priests than to any other class of men, since they had no families to provide for. On this ground he justifies the disgraceful attack made on a parsonage by two soldiers or brigands at the orders of a young gentleman, on which occasion a sheep was stolen from the stingy and gouty old priest. A single story of this kind illustrates the ideas in which men lived and acted better than all the dissertations in the world.