The Italian states, for the most part subject to foreign powers, were changing into monarchies. Italy was a province of Spain; and yet so detestable was that power that Navagero tells us, Paul IV. never spoke of the emperor or the Spaniards without calling them “heretics, robbers, accursed of God, children of Moors and Jews, offscouring of the earth,” and bewailing the fate of Italy compelled to serve such vile masters. Spain left such fierce antipathies behind her that the interjection “Cursed be Spain,” came down to our times. A wise Pope, Sixtus V., who tried to oppose the imperial power, died by poison (1590). For two centuries, the decrees which regulated Italian politics came from Madrid. Naples and Milan groaned in chains; the lords of Mantua, Ferrara, and Parma, gloried in their shameful bondage. Venice herself purchased peace by ignoble sacrifices. Of Rome I do not speak. That she was badly governed, witness the incessant revolts of her people, the conspiracy of Benedetto Accolti, and the obsequies of Paul IV. Emanuele Filiberto, who won for Austria the battles of San Quintino and Gravelines, consolidated with his victories the foreign dominion; and, educated in the school of Phillip II., he extinguished liberty in Savoy by abolishing his states general, and bathed his valleys with the blood of the Vaudois. The Republics of central Italy saw their last days in the same terrible period; Florence was in the grasp of Cosimo, Pistoia under the guns of a fortress; Arezzo paid with her liberties for favouring the imperial army; Lucca bought with money and the blood of Burlamacchi a short reprieve; Siena more generous than all others fought to the last extremity and perished, like Saguntum, among her own ruins. Thus while in the middle of the sixteenth century the great nations were consolidated which now control Europe, Italy was dying and dying by the fault of her own sons. The treaty of Castel Cambrese recognized and sealed the foreign dominion. From that moment, the love of letters ceased to be a worship. The form was polished; but the spirit was stifled. Our most illustrious artists, forced to live upon the patronage of foreign princes, preferred the security of servile ease to the dignity and modesty of true art. The money of the great seduced them to abandon truth and the people without whom genius is neither great nor productive. Pleasure for courtiers was their only aim. The country was dying, but no voice sang the hymn of death; no one gave history those pages of heroism which save the dignity of vanquished nations. On the contrary, Giovio with unblushing brow eulogized his golden pen; Casa sang in honour of the Charles V. whom he had once satirized. Alamanni apologized to the emperor for his famous verse saying that it is the poet’s office to lie, and Cellini himself could write:--“I work for pay.”