Thus was it that the Reformation had but an indirect influence on the Italian mind. The scanty seeds wafted across the Alps fell upon stony ground, and ere long withered away. But the great reaction of the papacy was not only directed against the new truths; it waged war upon every thing calculated to afford them a disguise under which they might become dangerous. The policy of pontiffs and the duty of the Inquisition tended to exclude all light, lest any rays of Protestantism should reach the faithful. During three centuries have these efforts been continued; and when we consider the talent by which they have been directed, the stern ministers by whom they have been carried out, we well may wonder that the Italian mind has not been utterly debased by foreign tyranny and priestly domination. They have sown the wind; it remains to reap the whirlwind. The fashion for classic imitation was succeeded in Italy by an age of rhetoricians, with Bembo at their head, and the academies as their strongholds. But they either encouraged or inadequately repressed a too fluent facility which has ever since been the blemish of their mellifluous language. In Boccalini's satirical _Ragguagli di Parnaso_, some prolix writer is condemned to a perusal of Guicciardini's narrative of the Pisan war; but, after a brief essay, he avows his preference for the galleys to pursuing, through dreary details, the siege and capture of a pigeon-house. This biting jest is applicable in a far greater degree to other writers of the sixteenth century, whose cumbrous grandiloquence is often diluted by trivialities, or tinselled with factitious pomp. Yet there were some authors of purer taste, who resisted such extravagance, and it is curious to find Caro, della Casa, and Bernardo Tasso concerting measures for curtailing the use of superabundant compliments. The two principal points of their attack were the recent substitution of the feminine pronoun in the third person singular for the second person plural in addressing any one, and the indiscriminate use of Lordship, Excellency, Gentility, as courteous phrases, to the entire exclusion of Master and Madam. Against the former of these abuses Caro and Tasso declare open war; but, although they unite in condemnation of the latter as still more fatal to vernacular purity, and avow themselves ready to support any onset, each shrinks from leading the charge. "This age of ours is altogether given up to adulation. Every one, in inditing a letter, bandies 'lordship'; all expect it when addressed. And not, forsooth, our grandees alone, but even the middle classes and the very plebeians aspire to such distinctions, taking affront if they receive them not, and noting as blunderers all who do not offer them the like. Most silly and revolting does it seem to me that we should have to speak to one person as if he were another, always talking to a sort of ideal abstraction, quite different from the individual himself. Yet this