There was nothing puritanic about that religion; it had made its peace with the nature of man and the climate of Italy. It allowed, in the carnivals, a moratorium on modesty, but it labored to preserve the institutions of marriage and the family against the credulity of women and the imagination of men. In the literate classes girls were sent to a convent at an early age—as early as their fifth year—not chiefly for education but for moral surveillance.
