The movement of intelligence and philosophy at Paris was responded to by the agitation of the rest of Europe, and especially in America.  Spain, under M. d’Aranda, was become alive to the general feeling; the Jesuits had disappeared; the Inquisition had extinguished its fires; the Spanish nobility blushed for the sacred theocracy of its monks.  Voltaire had correspondents at Cadiz and at Madrid.  The forbidden produce of our ideas was favoured even by those whose charge was to exclude it.  Our books crossed the snows of the Pyrenees.  Fanaticism, tracked by the light to its last den, felt Spain escaping from it.  The excess of a tyranny long undergone, prepared ardent minds for the excess of liberty.

In Italy, and even at Rome, the sombre Catholicism of the middle age was lighted up by the reflections of time.  It played even with the dangerous arms which philosophy was about to turn against it.  It seemed to consider itself as a weakened institution, which ought to have its long duration pardoned in consequence of its complaisance towards princes and the age.  Benedict XIV. (Lambertini) received from Voltaire the dedication of “Mahomet.”  The Cardinals Passionei and Quirini, in their correspondence with Ferney[6],—­Rome, in its bulls, preached tolerance for dissenters, and obedience to princes.  The pope disavowed and reformed the company of Jesus:  he soothed the spirit of the age.  Clement XIV. (Ganganelli) shortly after secularised the Jesuits, confiscated their possessions, and imprisoned their superior, Ricci, in the castle of Saint Angelo, the Bastille of papacy.  Severe only towards exaggerated zealots, he enchanted the Christian world by the evangelical sweetness, the grace of his understanding, and the poignancy of his wit; but pleasantry is the first step to the profanation of dogmata.  The crowd of strangers and English whom his affability attracted to Italy and retained at Rome, caused, with the circulation of gold and science, the inflowing of scepticism and indifference, which destroy creeds before they sap institutions.

Naples, under a corrupt court, left fanaticism to the populace.  Florence, under a philosophical prince, was an experimental colony of modern doctrines.  The poet Alfieri, that Tyrtaeus of Italian liberty, produced there his revolutionary dramas, and there sowed his maxims against the two-fold tyranny of popes and kings in every theatre in Italy.

Milan, beneath the Austrian flag, had within its walls a republic of poets and philosophers.  Beccaria wrote there more daringly than Montesquieu.  His work on “Crimes and Punishments” was a bill of accusation of all the laws of his native country. Parini Monte, Cesarotti, Pindemonte, Ugo Foscolo gay, serious, and heroic poets, then satirised the absurdities of their tyrants, the baseness of their fellow-countrymen, or sang, in patriotic odes, the virtues of their ancestors, and the approaching deliverance of their country.