still full of veiled freethinking, we find in the seventeenth century
the proof that no amount of such predisposition can countervail
thoroughly bad political conditions. Ground down by the matchless
misrule of Spain, from which the conspiracy of the monk Campanella
vainly sought to free her, and by the kindred tyranny of the papacy,
Italy could produce in its educated class, save for the men of science
and the students of economics, only triflers, whose unbelief was of
a piece with their cynicism. While Naples and the south decayed,
mental energy had for a time flourished in Tuscany, where, under
the grand dukes from Ferdinando I onwards, industry and commerce
had revived; and even after a time of retrogression Ferdinando II
encouraged science, now made newly glorious by the names of Galileo
and Torricelli. But again there was a relapse; and at the end of
the century, under a bigoted duke, Florence was priest-ridden and,
at least in outward seeming, gloomily superstitious; while, save for
the better conditions secured at Naples under the viceroyalty of the
Marquis of Carpi, [1569] the rest of Italy was cynically corrupt
and intellectually superficial. [1570] Even in Naples, of course,
enlightenment was restricted to the few. Burnet observes that "there
are societies of men at Naples of freer thoughts than can be found
in any other place of Italy"; and he admits a general tendency of
intelligent Italians to recoil from Christianity by reason of Catholic
corruption. But at the same time he insists that, though the laity
speak with scorn of the clergy, "yet they are masters of the spirits
of the people." [1571] Yet it only needed the breathing time and the
improved conditions under the Bourbon rule in the eighteenth century
to set up a wonderful intellectual revival.