something of the passionate mettle of this infant: his tempestuous mirth,
his fierce rages, his simplicity, his naïveté, his inquisitiveness, his
cunning, his deceit, his cruelty, his love of sunshine and bright
gewgaws.

To realize him as he was, you need but to bethink you that this was the
age in which the Decamerone of Giovanni Boccaccio, the Facetiae of
Poggio, the Satires of Filelfo, and the Hermaphroditus of Panormitano
afforded reading-matter to both sexes. This was the age in which the
learned and erudite Lorenzo Valla--of whom more anon--wrote his famous
indictment of virginity, condemning it as against nature with arguments
of a most insidious logic. This was the age in which Casa, Archbishop of
Benevento, wrote a most singular work of erotic philosophy, which, coming
from a churchman's pen, will leave you cold with horror should you chance
to turn its pages. This was the age of the Discovery of Man; the pagan
age which stripped Christ of His divinity to bestow it upon Plato, so
that Marsilio Ficino actually burnt an altar-lamp before an image of the
Greek by whose teachings--in common with so many scholars of his day--he
sought to inform himself.

It was an age that had become unable to discriminate between the merits
of the Saints of the Church and the Harlots of the Town. Therefore it
honoured both alike, extolled the carnal merits of the one in much the
same terms as were employed to extol the spiritual merits of the other.
Thus when a famous Roman courtesan departed this life in the year 1511,
at the early age of twenty-six, she was accorded a splendid funeral and
an imposing tomb in the Chapel Santa Gregoria with a tablet bearing the
following inscription:

"IMPERIA CORTISANA ROMANA QUAE