Catholic France, with all her troubles, fared on the whole better in the mental life. Rabelais was for his country a fountain of riotous wisdom all through the worst time of the civil wars; and before they had ended Montaigne began effectually the new enlightenment. Only in England, where Shakespeare and Bacon signalized Protestant rule, was there any similar good fortune; and both in England and France the period was one of extensive though necessarily cautious skepticism. Alongside of the first stirrings of Protestantism there had arisen in France a spirit of critical unbelief, represented by the Cymbalum Mundi of Bonaventure des Periers (1537), who had set out as a Protestant; and the ferocities of the war engendered in many a temper like his. What Montaigne did was to give to practical skepticism the warrant of literary genius, and to win for it free currency by the skill of his insinuation. Without such fortunate fathering, rationalism in England made much headway in the Elizabethan age. Shakespeare is deeply impregnated with its spirit; [25] Bacon gave it a broad basis under cover of orthodoxy; and even before their day there were loud protests that atheism was on foot wherever continental culture came. By such complainants the evil was early traced to Italy; and it is clear that there, after the Spanish conquest, men's energies turned from the closed field of politics to that of religion and philosophy, despite the Inquisition, very much as men in ancient Greece had turned to philosophy after the rise of the Macedonian tyranny. From Italy came alike Deism and Unitarianism, and such atheism as there was. The Inquisition still burned all heretics alike when it could catch them; but even among the clergy, nay, among the very inquisitors themselves, there were many heretics; and the zealots had to call in lay bigots to help them. Heretical books were burned by the thousand, most being absolutely suppressed; and when there was established (about 1550) the famous Index Expurgatorius, in imitation of the example already set at Louvain and Paris, it was soon found that some works by cardinals, and by the framer of the first Italian list, had to be included. Protestantism was thus crushed out in Italy, with due bloodshed to boot; and the heretical Franciscans were forced in mass to recant; but in the end there was no gain to faith. Heresy became more elusive and more pervasive; and when in the year 1600 the papacy put to death Giordano Bruno, his work as the herald of a new philosophy was already done. In the next generation appeared Galileo, the pioneer of a new era of practical science. Thus even in her time of downfall did Italy begin for Europe a second renascence.