Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2

se they were merciless in
their conquests and unintelligent in their administration of subjugated
provinces; because they glutted their lusts of avarice and hatred on
industrious folk of other creeds within their borders; because they
cultivated barren pride and self-conceit in social life; because at the
great epoch of Europe's reawakening they chose the wrong side and
adhered to it with fatal obstinacy. This obstinacy was disastrous to
their neighbors and ruinous to themselves. During the short period of
three reigns (between 1598 and 1700) they sank from the first to the
third grade in Europe, and saw the scepter passing in the New World from
their hands to those of more normally constituted races. That the
self-abandonment to sterilizing passions and ignoble persecutions which
marked Spain out for decay in the second half of the sixteenth century,
and rendered her the curse of her dependencies, can in part be ascribed
to the enthusiasm aroused in previous generations by the heroic conflict
with advancing Islam, is a thesis capable of demonstration. Yet none the
less is it true that her action at that period was calamitous to herself
and little short of destructive to Italy.

After the year 1530 seven Spanish devils entered Italy. These were the
devil of the Inquisition, with stake and torture-room, and war declared
against the will and soul and heart and intellect of man; the devil of
Jesuitry, with its sham learning, shameless lying, and casuistical
economy of sins; the devil of vice-royal rule, with its life-draining
monopolies and gross incapacity for government; the devil of an insolent
soldiery, quartered on the people, clamorous for pay, outrageous in
their lusts and violences; the devil of fantastical taxation, levying
tolls upon the bare necessities of life, and drying up the founts of
national well-being at their sources; the devil of petty-princedom,
wallowing in sloth and cruelty upon a pinchbeck throne; the devil of
effeminate hidalgoism, ruinous in expenditure, mean

John Addington Symonds (October 5, 1840 - April 19, 1893) was an English poet and literary critic. He was an early advocate of the validity of male love which included for him pederastic as well as egalitarian relationships, and which he would refer to as lamour de limpossible.

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