Intellectual culture in that day meant especially, almost exclusively, what has been since more technically called "learning." The movement, which was then once again stirring up the mind of the educated classes arose mainly, as every body knows, from the discovery and resuscitation of the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. To be, if not a good Grecian, at least a competent Latin scholar, was the first step absolutely necessary in the liberal education of either male or female. Nay, it constituted very frequently not only the first step, but the entire course. In Italy this was in an especial degree the case. Not only the fashion of literature, but the general tone of the educated mind became classical,—and pagan. And the rapidity with which the new modes of thought and fashion of taste spread, and,—speaking of course with reference only to the educated classes,—popularised themselves, is very striking. But they did so, because they were eminently suited to the proclivity of the minds to which they were presented. [Sidenote: THE NEW LEARNING.] For this new learning came to them as an emancipation and a licence. Such learning as had been before in existence was dry, severe, repulsive, associated only with ideas of discipline, sacrifice, and renunciation of the world and its pleasures—the proper business of ascetic priests and hermits. The new studies were the reverse of all this. Elegant, facile, materialistic in all their tendencies and associations, adapting themselves readily to the amusements and passions of the young and gay, they must be compared, if we would parallel them with aught of modern culture, with the lighter of those accomplishments, which are now called ornamental. The total unchristianising of Italian society, which the rage for classical literature very rapidly produced, was such as strikingly to justify the modern[1] crusade against classical culture preached by those who are anxious to preserve such Christianity as that, which then went down before the irruption of literary paganism. The exquisitely organised æsthetic faculties of the southern mind eagerly imbibed and readily assimilated the habits of thought, generated by a religion, whose only real object of worship was material beauty. The extremely relaxed morality of the time was subjected to a refining influence, but by no means checked by a literature rich in poetical drapery for every form of vice. And the lightest, gayest, freest portion of society, beginning now to be awakened to a relish for the elegances of life by increasing wealth and luxury, found exactly what suited them in the revived literature of the forefathers of their race; a literature which was the product of generations uninfluenced by the wholly irreconcilable ideas of a philosophy and religion imposed on their descendants with very partial success by men of differently constituted races from the east and from the north.