The Italians of the fifteenth century continued to revel in the glory of Rome and gradually forgot that there was an actual and living reality, hardly consistent with their superior attitude as the sons of Cæsar and Augustus. Prose and verse improved so long as the cult of antiquity retained its initial mystic fervour, that provided the religious element indispensable to all creative art. But when devotion to classical studies became a question of interest or vanity, it was only from the very greatest artists, from men whose real religion was the worship of art, that one could expect sincerity. All the others were only extraordinarily adept at the clever wording of other people’s ideas. They could never fail to deck any subject, no matter how mean, no matter how repulsive, in the full pomp of a Ciceronian oration, rich in beautiful sentences and displaying the careful study of all the figures of speech to be found in the classics. Fraccastorius describes a loathsome disease in the finest of post-classical hexameters. Politicians could act as meanly as they pleased, sure that the glory of Rome would raise them above the rest of mankind. Even their real superiority in historical feeling and in the interpretation of antiquity was a source of weakness. For when beaten in war they could always express contempt for the victors and call them barbarians, consoling themselves with their real intellectual and artistic superiority for their political humiliation. In 1494 Charles VIII of France invaded Italy, meeting with no resistance worth mentioning. It is not surprising, since the despairing cry of Boiardo _“Mentre che io canto, O Dio Redentore. Vedo l’Italia tutta a fiamma e a foco”_ is almost the swan-song of mediæval Italy. At the same time a twenty-year-old youth, destined to become the greatest poet of the age, Lodovico Ariosto, could sing with perfect Horatian art and with an equally perfect indifference for his country _“asperi furore militis tremendo Turribus ausoniis ruinam”_ and with all the selfishness of unconscious indifference _“Rursus quid hostis prospiciat sibi Me nulla tangat cura, sub arbuto Iacentem aquae ad murmur cadentis.”_ He has adopted the measures and harmonies of Horace and Virgil and, wrapped up in his pride in the glory of Rome, goes on singing his classical bucolic loves in complete indifference to the fate of his country: _“Est mea nunc Glycerae, mea nunc est cura Lycoris, Lyda modo meus est, est modo Phyllis amor.”_ Reality is a horrible dream, “_improba seclis conditio!_” he is shocked that _“nuper ab occiduis illatum gentibus, olim pressa quibus nostro colla fuere iugo.”_ Such a perfect Latinist could but seek to dismiss this hideous reality by ignoring it and to find refuge in the glorious memories of the past or in the creation of a world of fanciful chivalry.[5]