of indignation was replaced by the keener one of ridicule. Boccaccio’s popular tales spread the infamy of the monasteries and nunneries, and the hatred towards their inmates, far and wide. Henceforth contempt shall be the portion of the Church which had inspired his predecessors with mere horror. Poggio, Pulci, Franco, and others followed in the footsteps of the master, and though they could not rival Boccaccio in wit, they surpassed him in virulence. The real importance of these attacks lies in the circumstance that they were levelled not at persons but at institutions. The warfare was not waged so much against the body as against the soul of Catholicism. It is true that Italian Christianity had very early divested itself of some of the Oriental austerity of the cult, and that great part of its original colour had been toned down, or touched up, in accordance with Occidental taste. After twelve centuries of Roman practice very little, indeed, was left of the gospel preached on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. The self-sacrifice of the prophet had been replaced by the self-indulgence of the priest, the simplicity and humility of the saint by the purple splendour of the ecclesiastical prince, and the spirit of the Word had long been stifled beneath the mummeries and pageants of Roman ritual. But still there remained more than the Latin temperament, under the influence of the pagan revival, could bear with equanimity. The young Italian mind had had enough of the creed of abstinence, renunciation, and sacrifice; it panted for enjoyment. The litanies and the agonies of the Church repelled it; her self-mortifications and self-mystifications revolted it. The classic love for form was to oust again the Christian veneration for the spirit. Virgil ceased to be regarded as a heathen prophet of Christianity. Scholars ceased to scan his pages for predictions of the advent of Jesus, and began to revel in the charm of his paganism. In a former generation Dante had found in the poet of Mantua a ghostly guide to the Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven of Catholicism; the new school saw in him a mellifluous minstrel of sensuous joys: a singer of the beauty of flocks and flowers, of the humming bees, of the trilling birds, of the murmuring rivulets, of the loves of shepherds and shepherdesses. The muse of Theocritus had risen from her enchanted sleep of a thousand years and brought back with her the sanity and the light that were to banish the phantoms and the mists of the mediaeval hell. Italy celebrated the resurrection of Pan.