CHAPTER XIX
THE PROSE OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
The seventeenth century is for Italy a period of stagnation, relieved only by the endeavour to conceal decay by fantastic extravagance, by a fortunate reaction near its termination, and by some genuine progress in isolated directions, which would have been fruitful of important results in a better age. The false taste which disfigured the epoch was not peculiar to Italy; but while in other countries it appears a symptom of exuberant life, a disorder incident to infancy, in Italy it dominates literature, some departments of practical knowledge and study excepted. What elsewhere was boisterous youth, was in Italy premature old age. No other cause for this decadence can be assigned than the withering of national life under the blight of civil and ecclesiastical tyranny. The reform of the Church, the purification of morals, excellent things in themselves, had been bought from the counter-Reformation at far too high a price.
We have indicated 1564 as the year in which the North of Europe begins to gain steadily at the expense of the South. The date especially fatal to Italy may perhaps be carried five years back, to 1559, when the long contest between France and Spain for supremacy in the Peninsula was decided in favour of the latter by the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis. Up to this
