Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/126

116 morally, and religiously, society was breaking up. What was there to be serious about? All that gives meaning to life was gone: the ties of family, country, and God were snapped. What better thing was there to do than to retire to the country, and let the world go "the primrose path"? The striking thing in all this is, that the sense of the pleasure to be derived from the refinements of culture excluded from the minds of nearly all the most gifted Italians that gloom, which would have wrapped a Northern nation, at the sight of an anarchy which, if less terrible with blood than the French Revolution, was more appalling to the spirit. The Italians, however, went to their villas, to hear Bandello tell stories and Berni read verses. The City of the Plague, from which Boccaccio's garden party fled, is the permanent background of this golden age.

Life was something left behind, but art remained; and for the purposes of art, whose function was entertainment, the adventures of Orlando and his like were sufficiently serviceable. Such myths afforded opportunity for inexhaustible invention of incident, for the play of fancy, and the exhibition of the courtesies and humors of life;