Throughout
Italy there was a morning freshness, and the thrill and exhilaration of
conscious activity. Her imagination was roused by the revival of
ancient and now new learning, by the stories of travellers, by the
gains of commerce, by the excitements of religion and the alarms of
superstition. She was boastful, jealous, quarrelsome, lavish,
magnificent, full of fickleness,--exhibiting on all sides the
exuberance, the magnanimity, the folly of youth. After the long winter
of the Dark Ages, spring had come, and the earth was renewing its
beauty. And above all other cities in these days Florence was full of
the pride of life. Civil brawls had not yet reduced her to become an
easy prey for foreign conquerors. She was famous for wealth, and her
spirit had risen with prosperity. Many years before, one of the
Provencal troubadours, writing to his friend in verse, had
said,--"Friend Gaucelm, if you go to Tuscany, seek a shelter in the
noble city of the Florentines, which is named Florence. There all true
valor is found; there joy and song and love are perfect and adorned."
And if this were true in the earlier years of the thirteenth century,
it was still truer of its close; for much of early simplicity and
purity of manners had disappeared before the increasing luxury (_le
morbidezze d' Egitto_, as Boccaccio terms it) and the gathered wealth
of the city,--so that gayety and song more than ever abounded.
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