But in spite of the literary and scientific activity of the period,
Italian society was never quite so fantastically immoral as in this
long peace, which was broken only by the invasions of the French
republic. A wide-spread sentimentality, curiously mixed of love and
letters, enveloped the peninsula. Commerce, politics, all the business
of life, went on as usual under the roseate veil which gives its hue
to the social history of the time; but the idea which remains in
the mind is one of a tranquillity in which every person of breeding
devoted himself to the cult of some muse or other, and established
himself as the conventional admirer of his neighbor's wife. The
great Academy of Arcadia, founded to restore good taste in poetry,
prescribed conditions by which everybody, of whatever age or sex,
could become a poetaster, and good society expected every gentleman
and lady to be in love. The Arcadia still exists, but that gallant
society hardly survived the eighteenth century. Perhaps the greatest
wonder about it is that it could have lasted so long as it did. Its
end was certainly not delayed for want of satirists who perceived its
folly and pursued it with scorn. But this again only brings one doubt,
often felt, whether satire ever accomplished anything beyond a lively
portraiture of conditions it proposed to reform.
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