Renaissance in Italy, Volume 2 (of 7)

Formation of Conscious Personality in Italy-Aristocracy of Intellect-Self-culture as an Aim-Want of National Architecture-Want of National Drama-Eminence of Sculpture and Painting-Peculiar Capacity for Literature-Scholarship-Men of Many-sided Genius-Their Relation to the Age-Conflict between Medi?val Tradition and Humanism-Petrarch-The Meaning of the Revival begun by him-Cosmopolitan Philosophy-Toleration-An Intellectual Empire-Worldliness-Confusion of Impulses and Inspirations-Copernicus and Columbus-Christianity and the Classics-Italian Incapacity for Religious Reformation-Free Thought takes

the form of License-Harmonies attempted between Christianity and Antique Philosophy-Florentine Academy-Physical Qualities of the Italians-Portraits of Two Periods-Physical Exercises-Determination of the Race to Scholarship-Ancient Memories of Rome-The Cult of Antiquity-Desire of Fame-Fame to be found in Literature-The Cult of Intellect-The Cult of Character-Preoccupation with Personal Details-Biography-Ideal Sketches-Posthumous Glory-Enthusiasm for Erudition-Piero de' Pazzi-Florence and Athens-Paganism-Real Value of Italian Humanism-Pico on the Dignity of Man.

The conditions, political, social, moral, and religious, described in the first volume of this work, produced among the Italians a type of character nowhere else observable in Europe. This character, highly self-conscious and mentally mature, was needed for the intellectual movement of the Renaissance. Italy had proved herself incapable of forming an united nation, or of securing the principle of federal coherence; of maintaining a powerful military system, or of holding her own against the French and Spaniards. For these defects her Communes and her Despots, the Papacy and the kingdom of Naples, the theories of the medi?val doctrinaires and the enthusiasm of the humanists, were alike responsible; though the larger share belongs to Rome, resolutely hostile to the monarchical principle, and zealous, by espousing the Guelf faction, to maintain the discord of the nation. At the same time the very causes of political disunion were favourable to the intellectual growth of the Italians. Each State, whether republican or despotic, had, during the last years of the Middle Ages, formed a mixed society of nobles, merchants, and artisans, enclosed within the circuit of the city walls, and strongly marked by the peculiar complexion of their native place. Every town was a centre of activity and industry, eagerly competing with its neighbours, proud of its local characteristics, anxious to confer distinction on citizens who rose to eminence by genius or practical ability. Party strife in the republics, while it disturbed their internal repose, sharpened the intellect and strengthened the personality of the burghers. Exile and proscription, the common climax of civic warfare, made them still more self-determined and self-reliant by driving each man back upon his own resources. The despots, again, through the illegal tenure of their authority, were forced to the utmost possible development of individual character: since all their fortunes depended on their qualities as men. The plots and counter-plots of subjects eager for a change of government, and of neighbours anxious to encroach upon their territory, kept the atmosphere of their Courts in a continual state of agitation. One type of ability was fostered by the diplomatic relations of the several cities, yielding employment to a multitude of secretaries and ambassadors; another by the system of Condottiere warfare, offering a brilliant career to ambitious adventurers. In all departments open to a man of talent birth was of less importance than natural gifts; for the social barriers and grades of feudalism had either never existed in Italy, or had been shaken and confounded during the struggles of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The ranks of the tyrants were filled with sons of Popes and captains risen from the proletariat. The ruling class in the republics consisted of men self-made by commerce; and here the name at least of Popolo was sovereign. It followed that men were universally rated at what they proved themselves to be; and thus an aristocracy of genius and character grew up in Italy at a period when the rest of Europe presented but rare specimens of individuals emergent from the common herd. As in ancient Greece, the nation was of less importance than the city, and within the city personal ability carried overwhelming weight. The Italian history of the Renaissance resumes itself in the biography of men greater than their race, of mental despots, who absorbed its forces in themselves.

The intellectual and moral milieu created by multitudes of self-centred, cultivated personalities was necessary for the evolution of that spirit of intelligence, subtle, penetrative, and elastic, that formed the motive force of the Renaissance. The work achieved by Italy for the world in that age was less the work of a nation than that of men of power, less the collective and spontaneous triumph of a puissant people than the aggregate of individual efforts animated by one soul of free activity, a common striving after fame. This is noticeable at the very outset. The Italians had no national Epic: their Divine Comedy is the poem of the individual man. Petrarch erects self-culture to the rank of an ideal, and proposes to move the world from the standpoint of his study, darting his spirit's light through all the void circumference, and making thought a power.

The success and the failure of the Italians are alike referable to their political subdivisions, and to this strong development of their personality. We have already seen how they fell short of national unity and of military greatness. Even in the realm of art and literature the same conditions were potent. Some of the chief productions of humanity seem to require the co-operation of whole peoples working sympathetically to a common end. Foremost among these are architecture and the drama. The most splendid triumphs of modern architecture in the French and English Gothic were achieved by the half-unconscious striving of the national genius through several centuries. The names of the builders of the cathedrals are unknown: the cathedrals themselves bear less the stamp of individual thought than of popular instinct; their fame belongs to the race that made them, to the spirit of the times that gave them birth. It is not in architecture, therefore, that we expect the Italians, divided into small and rival States, and distinguished by salient subjectivity, to show their strength. Men like Niccola Pisano, Arnolfo del Cambio, Alberti, Brunelleschi, and Bramante were gifted with an individuality too paramount for the creation of more than mighty experiments in architecture. They bowed to no tradition, but followed the dictates of their own inventive impulse, selecting the types that suited them, and dealing freely with the forms they found around them. Instead of seeking to carry on toward its accomplishment a style, not made, but felt and comprehended by their genius, they were eager to produce new and characteristic masterpieces-signs and symbols of their own peculiar quality of mind. Italy is full of splendid but imperfect monuments of personal ability, works of beauty displaying no unbroken genealogy of unknown craftsmen, but attesting the skill of famous artists. For the practical architect her palaces and churches may, for this reason, be less instructive and less attractive than the public buildings of France. Yet for the student of national and personal characteristics, who loves to trace the physiognomy of a people in its edifices, to discover the mind of the artist in his work, their interest is unrivalled. In each city the specific genius loci meets us face to face: from each town-hall or cathedral the soul of a great man leans forth to greet our own. These advantages compensate for frequent extravagances, for audacities savouring of ignorance, and for awkwardness in the adoption and modification of incongruous styles. Moreover, it must always be remembered that in Italy the architect could not forget the monuments of Roman and Byzantine art around him. Classic models had to be suited to the requirements of modern life and Christian ritual; and when the Germans brought their Gothic from beyond the Alps, it suffered from its adaptation to a southern climate. The result was that Italy arrived at no great national tradition in architecture, and that free scope was offered to the whims and freaks of individual designers. When at length, at the end of the sixteenth century, the Italians attained to uniformity of taste, it was by the sacrifice of their originality. The pedantry of the classical revival did more harm to architecture than to letters, and pseudo-Roman purism superseded the genial caprices of the previous centuries.

If architecture may be said to have suffered in Italy from the supremacy of local characteristics and personal genius, overruling tradition and thwarting the evolution of a national style, the case was quite different with the other arts. Painting and sculpture demand the highest independence in the artist, and are susceptible of a far more many-sided treatment than architecture. They cannot be the common product of a people, but require the conscious application of a special ability to the task of translating thought and feeling into form. As painters, the Italians hold the first rank among civilised nations of the modern and the ancient world; and their inferiority as sculptors to the Greeks is mainly due to their mastery over painting, the essentially romantic art. The sensibilities of the new age craved a more emotional and agitated expression than is proper to sculpture. As early as the days of Ghiberti and Donatello it became clear that the Italian sculptors were following the methods of the sister art in their designs, while Michael Angelo alone had force enough to make marble the vehicle of thoughts that properly belong to painting or to music. The converse probably held good with the Greeks. What remains of their work in fresco and mosaic seems to show that they were satisfied with groups and figures modelled upon bas-reliefs and statues; just as the Florentines carved pictures, with architecture and landscape, in stone. More need not here be said upon this topic, since the achievements of the Italians in painting and in sculpture will form a main part of my history.

As regards literature, the subdivision of Italy into numerous small States and the energetic self-assertion of the individual were distinctly favourable. Though the want of a great public, such as can alone be found in the capital of a free, united nation, may be reckoned among the many reasons which prevented the Italians from developing the drama, yet the rivalry of town with town and of burgher with burgher, Court life with its varied opportunities for the display of talent, and municipal life with its restless competition in commerce and public affairs, encouraged the activity of students, historians, statisticians, critics, and poets. Culture, in the highest and widest sense of the word, was what Renaissance Italy obtained and gave to Europe; and this culture implies a full-formed personality in the men who seek it. It was the highly perfected individuality of the Italians that made them first emerge from medi?val bondage and become the apostles of humanism for the modern world. It may be regretted that their force was expended upon the diffusion of learning and the purification of style, instead of being concentrated on the creation of national masterpieces. We seek in vain for Dante's equal among the poets of the Renaissance. The 'Orlando Furioso' is but a poor second to the 'Divina Commedia;' and all those works of scholarship, which seemed to our ancestors the ne plus ultra of refinement, are now relegated to the lumber-room of erudition that has been superseded, or of literary ingenuity that has lost its point. Now that the boon of culture, so hardly won by the students of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, has become the common heritage of Europe, it is not always easy to explain the mental grandeur of the Italians in that age. Yet we should fail to recognise their merit, if we did not comprehend that, precisely by this absorption of their genius in the task of the Revival, they conferred the most enduring benefits upon humanity. What the modern world would have been, if the Italian nation had not devoted its energies to the restoration of liberal learning, cannot even be imagined. The history of that devotion will form the principal subject of my present volume.

The comprehensive and many-sided natures, frequent in Renaissance Italy, were specially adapted for the dissemination of the new spirit. The appearance of such men as Leo Battista Alberti, Lionardo da Vinci, Lorenzo de' Medici, Brunelleschi and Buonarroti, Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola, upon the stage of the Renaissance is not the least fascinating of its phenomena. We can only find their parallels by returning to the age of Pericles. But the problem for the Florentines differed from that which the Athenians had before them. In Greece, the morning-land of civilisation, men of genius, each perfect in his own capacity, were needed. Standards had to be created for the future guidance of the world in all the realms of art and thought. We are therefore less struck with the versatility than with the concentration of Pheidias, Pindar, Sophocles, Socrates. Italy, on the other hand, had for her task the reabsorption of a bygone culture. It was her vocation to resuscitate antiquity, to gather up afresh the products of the classic past, and so to blend them with the medi?val spirit as to generate what is specifically modern. It was indispensable that the men by whom this work was accomplished should be no less distinguished for largeness of intelligence, variety of acquirements, quickness of sympathy, and sensitive susceptibility, than for the complete development of some one faculty. The great characters of the Greek age were what Hegel calls plastic, penetrated through and through with a specific quality. Those of the Italian age were comprehensive and encyclop?dic; the intensity of their force in any one sphere is less remarkable than its suitableness to all. They were of a nature to synthesise, interpret, reproduce, and mould afresh-like Mr. Browning's Cleon, with the addition of the consciousness of young and potent energy within them. It consequently happens that, except in the sphere of the Fine Arts, we are tempted to underrate the heroes of the Renaissance. The impression they leave upon our minds at any one point is slight in comparison with the estimate we form of them when we consider each man as a whole. Nor can we point to monumental and colossal works in proof of their creative faculty.

The biographies of universal geniuses like Leo Battista Alberti or Lionardi da Vinci, so multiform in their capacity and so creative in their intuitions, prompt us to ask what is the connection between the spirit of an age and the men in whom it is incorporated. Not without reason are we forced to personify the Renaissance as something external to its greatest characters. There is an intellectual strength outside them in the century, a heritage of power prepared for them at birth. The atmosphere in which they breathe is so charged with mental vitality that the least stirring of their special energy brings them into relation with forces mightier than are the property of single natures. In feebler periods of retrospect and criticism we can but wonder at the combination of faculties so varied, and at miracles so easily accomplished. These times of clairvoyance and of intellectual magnetism, when individuals of genius appear to move like vibrios in a life-sustaining fluid specially adapted to their needs, are rare in the history of the world; nor has our science yet arrived at analysing their causes. They are not on that account the less real. To explain them by the hypothesis of a Weltgeist, the collective spirit of humanity proceeding in its evolution through successive phases, and making its advance from stage to stage by alternations of energy and repose, is simply to restore, in other terms, a mystery that finds its final and efficient cause in God.[2]

Gifted with the powerful individuality I am attempting to describe, the men of the Renaissance received their earliest education in the religion of the Middle Ages, their second in the schools of Greece and Rome. It was the many-sided struggle of personal character with time-honoured tradition on the one hand, and with new ideals on the other, that lent so much of inconsistency and contradiction to their aims. Dante remained within the pale of medi?val thoughts, and gave them full poetical expression. To him, in a truer sense than to any other poet, belongs the double glory of immortalising in verse the centuries behind him, while he inaugurated the new age. The 'Vita Nuova' and the 'Divina Commedia' are modern, in so far as the one is the first complete analysis of personal emotion, and the other is the epic of the soul conceived as concrete personality. But the form and colour, the material and structure, the warp of thought and the woof of fancy, are not modern. Petrarch opens a new era. He is not satisfied with the body of medi?val beliefs and intellectual conceptions. Antiquity presents a more fascinating ideal to his spirit, and he feels the subjectivity within him strong enough to assimilate what suits it in the present and the past. The Revival of Learning, begun by Petrarch, was no mere renewal of interest in classic literature. It was the emancipation of the reason in a race of men, intolerant of control, ready to criticise accepted canons of conduct, enthusiastic in admiration of antique liberty, freshly awakened to the sense of beauty, and anxious above all things to secure for themselves free scope in spheres outside the region of authority. Men so vigorous and independent felt the joy of exploration. There was no problem they feared to face, no formula they were not eager to recast according to their new convictions. This liberty of judgment did not of necessity lead to lawlessness; nor in any case did it produce that insurgence against Catholic orthodoxy which marked the German Reformation. Yet it lent a characteristic quality to thought and action. Men were, and dared to be, themselves for good or evil without too much regard for what their neighbours thought of them. At the same time they were tolerant. The culture of the Renaissance implied a philosophical acceptance of variety in fashion, faith, and conduct; and this toleration was no doubt one reason why Italian scepticism took the form of cynicism, not of religious revolution. Contact with Islam in the south and east, diplomatic relations with the Turks, familiarity with the mixed races of Spain, and commerce with the nations of the north, had widened the sympathies of the Italians, and taught them to regard humanity as one large family. The liberal spirits of the Renaissance might have quoted Marcus Aurelius with slight alteration: 'I will not say, dear City of St. Peter, but, dear City of Man!' And just as their moral and religious sensibilities were blunted, so patriotism with them ceased to be an instinct. Instead of patriotism, the Italians were inflamed with the zeal of cosmopolitan culture.

In proportion as Italy lost year by year the hope of becoming an united nation, in proportion as the military instincts died in her, and the political instincts were extinguished by despotism, in precisely the same ratio did she evermore acquire a deeper sense of her intellectual vocation. What was world-embracing in the spirit of the medi?val Church passed by transmutation into the humanism of the fifteenth century. As though aware of the hopelessness of being Italians in the same sense as the natives of Spain were Spaniards, or the natives of France were Frenchmen, the giants of the Renaissance did their utmost to efface their nationality in order that they might the more effectually restore the cosmopolitan ideal of the human family. To this end both artists and scholars, the depositaries of the real Italian greatness at this epoch, laboured; the artists by creating an ideal of beauty with a message and a meaning for all Europe, the scholars by recovering for Europe the burghership of Greek and Roman civilisation. In spite of the invasions and convulsions that ruined Italy between the years 1494 and 1527, the painters and the humanists proceeded with their task, as though the fate of Italy concerned them not, as though the destinies of the modern world depended on their activity. After Venice had been desolated by the armies of the League of Cambray, Aldus Manutius presented the peace-gift of Plato to the foes of his adopted city; and when the Lutherans broke into Parmegiano's workshop at Rome, even they were awed by the tranquil majesty of the Virgin on his easel. Stories like these remind us that Renaissance Italy met her doom of servitude and degradation in the spirit of ancient Hellas, repeating as they do the tales told of Archimedes in his study, and of Paulus ?milius face to face with the Zeus of Pheidias.

As patriotism gave way to cosmopolitan enthusiasm, and toleration took the place of earnestness, in like manner the conflict of medi?val tradition with revived Paganism in the minds of these self-reliant men, trained to indulgence by their large commerce with the world, and familiarised with impiety by the ever-present pageant of an anti-Christian Church, led, as I have hinted, to recklessness and worldly vices, rather than to reformed religion. Contented with themselves and their surroundings, they felt none of the unsatisfied cravings after the infinite, none of the mysterious intuitions and ascetic raptures, the self-abasements and transfigurations, stigmata and beatific visions, of the Middle Ages. The plenitude of life within them seemed to justify their instincts and their impulses, however varied and discordant these might be. The sonorous current of the world around them drowned the voice of conscience, the suggestion of religious scruples. It is only thus we can explain to ourselves the attitude of such men as Sixtus and Alexander, serenely vicious in extreme old age. The gratification of their egotism was so complete as to exclude self-judgment by the rules and standards they professionally applied; their personality was too exacting to admit of hesitation when their instincts were concerned; in common with their age they had lost sight of all but mundane aims and interests. Three aphorisms, severally attributed to three representative Italians, may be quoted in illustration of these remarks. 'You follow infinite objects; I follow the finite;' said Cosimo de' Medici; 'you place your ladders in the heavens; I on earth, that I may not seek so high or fall so low.' 'If we are not ourselves pious,' said Julius II., 'why should we prevent other people from being so?' 'Let us enjoy the Papacy,' said Leo X., 'now that God has given it to us.'

It was only under the influence of some external terror-a plague, a desolating war, an imminent peril to the nation-that the religious sense, deadened by worldliness and selfish philosophy, made itself felt. At such seasons whole cities rushed headlong into fierce revivalism, while men of violent or profligate lives saw visions, and betook themselves to penance. Cellini's Memoirs are, on this point, a valuable mirror of the age in which he lived. It is clear that his ecstasies of devotion in the dungeons of S. Angelo were as sincere as the fiery impulses he obeyed with so much complacency. Passionate and worldly as men of Cellini's stamp might be, they could not shake off the associations that bound them to the past. The energy of their intense individuality took turn by turn the form and colour of ascetic piety and Pagan sensuality; and at times these strong contrasts of emotion seemed bordering upon insanity. Ungovernable natures, swayed by no fixed principle, and bent on moulding the world of thought afresh to suit their own desires, became the puppets of astrological superstition, the playthings of mad lust. Much that appears unaccountable and contradictory in the Renaissance may be referred to this imperfect blending of ecclesiastical tradition and idealised Paganism in natures potent enough to be original and wilful, but not yet tamed from semi-savagery into acquiescence by experience. Experience came to the Italians in servitude beneath the heel of Spain.

The confusion of influences, classical and medi?val, Christian and Pagan, in that age is not the least extraordinary of its phenomena. Even the new thoughts that illuminated the minds of great discoverers, seemed to them like reflections from antiquity; and while they were opening fresh worlds, their hearts were turned toward the Holy Land of the Crusades. Columbus and Copernicus, the two men who did more than any others to revolutionise the mental attitude of humanity, appealed to their contemporaries on the strength of texts from Aristotle and Philolaus. Conscious that the guesses of the Greek cosmographers had stimulated in themselves that curiosity whereby they made the motion of the earth a certainty, and found a way across the waves to a new continent, these mighty spirits forgot how slight in reality was their debt to the inert speculators of the classic age. The truth was that in them throbbed a force of enterprise and conquering discovery, a spirit of exploration resolute and hardy, denied to the ancients.

How far this new and fruitful temper of the modern mind was due to Christianity, is a problem for the deepest speculation. The conception of a God who had made no part of His world in vain, of a Christ who had bought with His blood the whole seed of Adam, and who imposed the preaching of the faith upon His followers as a duty, wrought powerfully on Columbus. The Crusades, again, had familiarised the nations with distant objects and ideal quests; while chivalry was essentially antagonistic to positive and selfish aims. The spirit of mankind had marched a long stage during the Middle Ages. It was not possible now to conceive of God as a tranquil thinking upon thought, with Aristotle. There was no Augustus to set arbitrary limits to the empire of the world in the interest of a conquering nation, or to make the two words orbs and urbs synonymous. When Strabo hazarded the opinion that there might be populous islands in the other hemisphere, he added, with the sublime indifference of a Roman, 'But these speculations have nothing in common with practical geography; and if such islands exist, they cannot support peoples of like origin with us.' Such language was impossible for a man educated in the Christian faith, and imbued with the instincts of romanticism. Therefore, though the study of Strabo and Ptolemy at Pavia impressed Columbus with the certainty of the new route across the ocean, he owed the courage that sustained him to the conviction that God was leading him to a great end. 'When I first undertook to start for the discovery of the Indies,' he says in his will, 'I intended to beg the King and Queen to devote the whole of the money that might be drawn from these realms to Jerusalem.' The religious yearning of the medi?val pilgrim added fervour to the conviction of the student, who, by reasoning on antique texts, guessed the greatest secret of which the world has record. At the same time there was something more in Columbus than either antiquity or medi?valism could provide. The modern spirit is distinct from both; and though, in the Renaissance, creation wore the garb of imitation, and the new forces used the organs they were destined to outlive and destroy, yet we must allow to native personality the lion's share in such achievement as that of Columbus. It is the variety of spiritual elements in combination and solution, which he illustrates, that makes the psychology of the Renaissance at once so fascinating and so difficult to analyse.

While so much liberty of thought prevailed in Italy, it may be wondered why the Renaissance, eminently fertile in the domains of art and culture, bore but meagre fruit in those of religion and philosophy. The German Reformation was the Renaissance of Christianity; and in this the Italians had no share, though it should be remembered that, without their previous labours in the field of scholarship, the band who led the Reformation could hardly have given that high intellectual character to the movement which made it a new starting-point in the history of the reason. To expect from Italy the ethical regeneration of the modern world would be to misapprehend her true vocation; art and erudition were sufficient to engage her spiritual energies. The Church again, though by no means adverse to laxity in morals, was jealous of heterodoxy. So long as freethinkers confined their audacity to such matters as form the topic of Poggio's 'Faceti?,' Beccadelli's 'Hermaphroditus,' or La Casa's 'Capitolo del Forno,' the Roman Curia looked on and smiled approvingly. The most obscene books to be found in any literature escaped the Papal censure, and Aretino, notorious for ribaldry, aspired not wholly without reason to the scarlet of a cardinal. But even in the fifteenth century the taint of heresy was dangerous, and this peril was magnified when the Lutheran schism had roused the Papacy to a sense of its position. Under the patronage, therefore, of ecclesiastics, in the depraved atmosphere of Rome, the free thought of the Italians turned to licentiousness; this suited the temper of the people, fascinated by Paganism and little inclined to raise debate upon matters of no practical utility. Those who reflected on religious topics kept their own counsel. How purely political were the views of profound thinkers in Italy upon all Church questions may be gathered from the observations of Guicciardini and Machiavelli; how little the most earnest antagonist of ungodly ecclesiastics dreamed of disturbing the Catholic Church system is clear in the biography of Savonarola.[3] The first satire of Ariosto may be indicated as an epitome of the opinions entertained by sound and liberal intellects in Italy upon the relation of Papal Rome to the nation. There is not a trace in it of Teutonic revolt against authority, of pious yearning for a purer faith. The standpoint of the critic, though solid and sincere, is worldly.

True to culture as their main preoccupation, the Italian thinkers sought to philosophise faith by bringing Christianity into harmony with antique speculation, and forming for themselves a theism that should embrace the systems of the Platonists and Stoics, the Hebrew Cabbala and the Sermon on the Mount. There is much that strikes us as both crude and pedantic, at the same time infantine and pompous, in the systems elaborated by those pioneers of modern eclecticism. They lack the vigorous simplicity that gave its force to Luther's intuition, the sublime unity of Spinoza's deductions. The dross of erudition mingles with the pure gold of personal conviction; while Pagan phrases, ill suited to express Christian notions, lend an air of unreality to the sincerest efforts after rational theology. The Platonic Academy of Florence was the centre of this search after the faith of culture, whereof the real merit was originality, and the true force lay in the conviction that humanity is one and indivisible. Its apostles were Pico della Mirandola and Ficino. It found lyrical expression in verses like the following, translated by me from the Greek hexameters of Poliziano:-

O Father, Lord enthroned on gold, that dwellest in high heaven,

O King of all things, deathless God, Thou Pan supreme, celestial!

That seest all, and movest all, and all with might sustainest,

Older than oldest time, of all first, last, and without ending!

The firmament of blessed souls, of stars the heavenly splendour,

The giant sun himself, the moon that in her circle shineth,

And streams and fountains, earth and sea, are things of Thy creating,

Thou givest life to all; all these Thou with Thy Spirit fillest.

The powers of earth, and powers of heaven, and they in pain infernal

Who pine below the roots of earth, all these obey Thy bidding.

Behold, I call upon Thee now, Thy creature on earth dwelling,

Poor, short of life, O God, of clay a mean unworthy mortal,

Repenting sorely of my sins, and tears of sorrow shedding.

O God, immortal Father, hear! I cry to Thee; be gracious,

And from my breast of this vain world the soul-enslaving passion,

The demon's wiles, the wilful lust, that damns the impious, banish!

Wash throughly all my heart with Thy pure Spirit's rain abundant,

That I may love Thee, Lord, alone, Thee, King of kings, for ever.

This is but a poor substitute for the Lord's Prayer. Hell and purgatory are out of place in its theism. Χρυσ?θρονο? and α?θερι να?ων are tawdry epithets for 'Our Father which art in heaven.' Yet it is precisely in these contradictions and confusions that we trace the sincerity of the Renaissance spirit, seeking to fuse together the vitality of the old faith and the forms of novel culture, worshipping a Deity created in the image of its own mind, composite and incoherent.

Physically, the Italians of the Renaissance were equal to any task they chose to set themselves. No mistake is greater than to suppose that, because the summer climate of Italy is hotter than our own, therefore her children must be languid, pleasure-loving, and relaxed. Twelve months spent in Tuscany would suffice to dissipate illusions about the enervating Italian air, even if the history of ancient Rome were not a proof that the hardiest race of combatants and conquerors the world has ever seen were nurtured between Soracte and the sea. After the downfall of the Empire, what remained of native vigour in the Latin cities found a refuge in the lagoons of Venice and other natural strongholds. Walled towns in general retained a Roman population. The primitive Italic races still existed in the valleys of the Apennines, while the Ligurians held the Genoese Riviera; nor were the Etruscans extinct in Tuscany. It is true that Rome had fused these races into a people using the same language. Yet the ethnologist will hardly allow that the differences noticeable between the several districts of Italy were not connected with original varieties of stock. To the people, as Rome had made it, fresh blood was added by the Goths, Lombards, and Germans descending from the North. Greeks, Arabs, Normans, and, in course of time, Franks influenced the South. During the Middle Ages a new and mighty breed of men sprang into being by the combination of these diverse elements, each district deriving specific quality from the varying proportions in which the chief constituents were mingled. It is noticeable that where the Roman-Etruscan blood was purest probably from mixture, in the valley of the Arno, the modern Italian genius found its home. Florence and her sister cities formed the language and the arts of Italy. To this race, in conjunction with the natives of Lombardy and Central Italy, was committed the civilisation of Europe in the fifteenth century. It was only south of Rome, where the brutalising traditions of the Roman latifundia had never yielded to the burgh-creating impulse of the Middle Ages, that the Italians were unfit for their great duty. On these southern states the Empire of the East, Saracen marauders and Norman conquerors, the French and the Spanish dynasties, had successively exercised a pernicious influence; nor did the imperial policy of Frederick II. remain long enough in operation to effect a radical improvement in the people. Even at Naples culture was always an exotic. Elsewhere throughout the peninsula the Italians of the new age were a noble nation, gifted with physical, emotional, and mental faculties in splendid harmony. In some districts, notably in Florence, circumstance and climate had been singularly favourable to the production of such glorious human beings as the world has rarely seen. Beauty of person, strength of body, and civility of manners were combined in the men of that favoured region with intellectual endowments of the highest order: nor were these gifts of nature confined to a caste apart; the whole population formed an aristocracy of genius.

In order to comprehend the greatness of this Italian type in the Renaissance, it is only needful to study the picture galleries of Florence or of Venice with special attention to the portraits they contain. When we compare those senators and sages with the subjects of Dürer's and of Cranach's art, we feel the physical superiority of the Italians. In like manner a comparison of the men of the fifteenth century with those of the sixteenth shows how much of that physical grandeur had been lost. It is easy to wander astray while weaving subtle theories on this path of criticism. Yet it cannot be a mere accident that Vandyck's portrait of the Cardinal de' Bentivogli in the Pitti Palace differs as it does from that of the Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici by Pontormo or by Titian. The Medici is an Italian of the Renaissance, with his imperious originality and defiance of convention. He has refused to be portrayed as an ecclesiastic. Titian has painted him in Hungarian costume of dark red velvet, moustached, and sworded like a soldier; in Pontormo's picture he wears a suit of mail, and rests his left hand on a large white hound. The Bentivoglio is an Italian of the type produced by the Counter-Reformation. His delicate lace ruffs, the coquetry of his scarlet robes, and the fine keen cut of his diplomatic features betray a new spirit.[4] Surely the physical qualities of a race change with the changes in their thought and feeling. The beauty of Tasso is more feminine and melancholy than that of Ariosto, in whom the liberal genius of the Renaissance was yet alive. Among the scowling swordsmen of the seventeenth century you cannot find a face like Giorgione's Gattamelata;[5] the nobles who bear themselves so proudly on the canvases of Vandyck at Genoa lack the urbanity of Raphael's Castiglione; Moroni's black-robed students are more pinched and withered than the Pico of the Uffizzi. It will not do to strain such points. It is enough to suggest them. What remains, however, for certain is that the Italians of the fifteenth century-and among these must be included those who lived through the first half of the sixteenth-had physical force and character corresponding to their robust individuality. Until quite late in the Renaissance so much survived of feudal customs even in Italy that riding, the handling of the lance and sword, and all athletic exercises formed a part of education no less indispensable than mental training. Great cities had open places set apart for tournaments and games; in Tuscan burghs the palio was run on feast days, and May mornings saw the prentice lads of Florence tilting beneath the smiles of girls who danced at nightfall on the square of Santa Trinità. Bloody battles in the streets were frequent. The least provocation caused a man to draw his dagger. Combats a steccato chiuso were among the pastimes to which a Pope might lend his countenance. Skill in swordsmanship was therefore a necessity. For the rest, we learn from Castiglione that the perfect gentleman was bound to be an accomplished dancer, a bold rider, a skilled wrestler, a swift runner, to shoot well at the mark, to hurl the javelin and the quoit with grace, and to play at tennis and pallone. In addition he ought to affect some one athletic exercise in such perfection as to beat professors of the same on their own ground. Cesare Borgia took pride in felling an ox at a single blow, and exhibited his marksman's cunning by shooting condemned criminals in a courtyard of the Vatican.

That such men should have devoted their energies to intellectual culture at a time when English nobles could barely read or write, and when the chivalry of France regarded learning with disdain, was a proof of their rich natural endowments. Nor was the determination of the race to scholarship in any sense an accident. Throughout the length and breadth of Italy, memories of ancient greatness spurred her children on to emulation. Ghosts of Roman patriots and poets seemed hovering round their graves, and calling on posterity to give them life again. If we cannot bring back Greece and Rome, at least let us make Florence a second Athens, and restore the Muses to Ausonian vales. That was the cry. It was while gazing on the ruins of Rome that Villani felt impelled to write his chronicle. Pavia honoured Boethius like a saint. Mantua struck coins with the head of Virgil, and Naples pointed out his tomb. Padua boasted of Livy, and Como of the Plinies. 'Sulmona,' cried Boccaccio, 'mourns because she holds not Ovid's dust; and Parma is glad that Cassius rests within her walls.' Such reverence for the great men of antiquity endured throughout the Middle Ages, creating myths that swayed the fancy, and forming in the popular consciousness a presentiment of the approaching age. There is something pathetic in the survival of old Roman titles, in the freak of the legend-making imagination that gave to Orlando the style of Roman senator, in the outburst of enthusiasm for Rienzi when he called himself Tribunus Populi Romani. With the Renaissance itself this affection for the past became a passion. Pius II. amnestied the people of Arpino because they were fellow-citizens of Cicero. Alfonso of Naples received as a most precious gift from Venice a bone supposed to be the leg of Livy. All the patricians of Italy invented classical pedigrees; and even Paul II., because he was called Barbo, claimed descent from the Ahenobarbi. Such instances might be multiplied indefinitely. It is, however, more to the purpose here to notice that in Italy this adoration of the antique world was common to all classes; not students alone, but the people at large regarded the dead grandeur of the classic age as their especial heritage. To resuscitate that buried glory, and to reunite themselves with the past, was the earnest aim of the Italians as a nation. A conviction prevailed that the modern world could never be so radiant as the old. This found its expression in the saying that Rome's chief ornaments were her ruins; in the belief that Julia's corpse, discovered in the Appian Way, surpassed all living maidens; in Matarazzo's observation that Astorre Baglioni's body was worthy of an ancient Roman. In their admiration for antiquity, scholars were blind to the specific glories of the modern genius. Lionardo Bruni, for example, exclaimed that 'the ancient Greeks by far excelled us Italians in humanity and gentleness of heart.' Yet what Greek poem can be compared for tenderness with Dante's 'Vita Nuova,' with the 'Canzoniere' of Petrarch, or with the tale of Griselda in Boccaccio? Gentilezza di cuore was the most characteristic product of chivalry, and the fourth ?neid is the only classic masterpiece of pure romantic pathos. This humility of discipleship was not, however, strong enough to check emulation. On the contrary, the yearning towards antiquity acted like a potent stimulus on personal endeavour, generating an acute desire for fame, a burning aspiration to be numbered with the mighty men of old. When Virgil introduced Dante to the company of Homer and his peers, the rank of sesto tra cotanto senno rewarded him for all his labour in the rhyme that made him thin through half a lifetime. Petrarch, who exceeded Dante in the thirst for literary honour, turned from the men of his generation to converse in long epistles with the buried saints of Latin culture. For men of less ambition it was enough to feel that they could raise their souls through study to communion with the stately spirits of antiquity, passing like Machiavelli from trivial affairs into their closet, where they donned their reading robes and shook hands across the centuries with Cicero or Livy. It was the universal object of the humanists to gain a consciousness of self distinguished from the vulgar herd, and to achieve this by joining the great company of bards and sages, whose glory could not perish.

Whoever felt within himself the stirring of the spirit under any form, sought earnestly for fame; and in this way a new social atmosphere, unknown to the nations of the Middle Ages, was formed in Italy. A large and liberal acceptance, recognising ability of all kinds, irrespective of rank or piety or martial prowess, displaced the narrower judgments of the Church and feudalism. Giotto, the peasant's son, ranked higher in esteem than Cimabue, the Florentine citizen, because his work of art was worthier. Petrarch had his place in no official capacity, but as an honoured equal, at the marriage feasts of princes. Poliziano corresponded with kings, promising immortality as a more than regal favour. Pomponius L?tus could afford to repel the advances of the Sanseverini, feeling that erudition ranked him higher than his princely kinsmen. It was not wealth or policy alone that raised the Medici among the Despots so far above the Baglioni of Perugia or the Petrucci of Siena. They owed this distinction rather to their comprehension of the craving of their age for culture. Thus though birth commanded respect for its own sake, a new standard of eminence had been established, and personal merit was the passport which carried the meanest into the most illustrious company. Men of all conditions and all qualifications met upon the common ground of intellectual intercourse. The subjects they discussed may be gathered from the introductions to Firenzuola's novels, from Bembo's 'Asolani' and Castiglione's 'Cortegiano,' from Guicciardini's 'Dialogue on Florence,' or from the 'Camaldolese Discourses' of Landino. Society of this kind existed nowhere else in Europe. To Italy belongs the proud priority of having invented the art of polite conversation, and anticipated the French salon after an original and urbane fashion of her own.

Under these conditions a genuine cultus of intellect sprang up in Italy. Princes and people shared a common impulse to worship the mental superiority of men who had no claim to notice but their genius. It was in the spirit of this hero-worship that the terrible Gismondo Pandolfo Malatesta transferred to Rimini the bones of Pletho, and wrote his impassioned epitaph upon the sarcophagus outside Alberti's church. The biographies of the humanists abound in stories of singular honours paid to men of parts, not only by princes who rejoiced in their society, but also by cities receiving them with public acclamation. And, as it often happens that a parody reveals the nature of the art it travesties, such light is thrown upon our subject by the vile Pietro Aretino, who, because he was a man of talent and unscrupulous in its employment, held kings and potentates beneath his satyr's hoof. It is not, however, needful to go thus far afield for instances. Some lines of our own poet Webster exactly describe the Catholicity of the Renaissance, which first obtained in Italy for men of marked abilities, and afterwards to some extent prevailed at large in Europe:-

Virtue is ever sowing of her seeds:

In the trenches for the soldier; in the wakeful study

For the scholar; in the furrows of the sea

For men of our profession: of all which

Arise and spring up honour.

The virtue here described bears the Italian sense of virtù, the Latin virtus, the Greek ?ρετ?, that which makes a man. It might display itself in a thousand ways; but all alike brought honour, and honour every man was bound to seek. The standard whereby the Italians judged this virtue was ?sthetical rather than moral. They were too dazzled by brilliant achievement to test it in the crucible of ethics. This is the true key to Machiavelli's critique of Castruccio Castracane, Gianpaolo Baglioni, Cesare Borgia, and Piero Soderini. In common with his race, he was fascinated by character, and attached undue importance to the force that made men seek success even through crime.

The thirst for glory and the worship of ability stimulated the Italians, earlier than any other nation, to commemorate what seemed to them noteworthy in their own lives and in those of their contemporaries. Dante, within the pale of medi?valism, led the way in both of these directions. His 'Vita Nuova' is a chapter of autobiography restrained within the limits of consummate art. His portraits of S. Francis and S. Dominic (not to mention other medallions and cameos of predecessors or contemporaries-Farinata, for example, or Boniface VIII.) record the special qualities whereby those heroes of the faith were distinguished from the herd of men around them. Boccaccio's 'Life of Dante' is a further step in the direction of purely modern biography. Then follow the collections of Filippo Villani, Giovanni Cavalcanti, Vespasiano, Platina, Decembrio, Beccadelli, Caracciolo, and Paolo Giovio. Vasari's 'Lives of the Painters' are unique in their attempt to embrace within a single work whatever struck their author as most characteristic in the career of one particular class of men. For historical precision the portraits composed by Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Varchi, Pitti, and many of the minor annalists leave nothing to be desired. Such autobiographies as those of Petrarch, Cellini, Cardano, and Cornaro are models in their kind; whether their object were simply self-glorification, or whether a scientific and didactic purpose underlay the chronicle of a lifetime, the result is equally vivid and interesting. Hero-worship prompted Gian Francesco Pico to compose the 'Life of Savonarola,' and Condivi to write that of Michael Angelo. Scorn and hatred impelled Platina to transmit the outline of Paul II. to posterity in a caricature, the irony of which is so restrained that it might pass for sincerity. Machiavelli's 'Biography of Castruccio' is a political romance indited with a philosophical intention. What motive, beyond admiration, produced the anonymous 'Memoir of Alberti,' so terse in its portraiture, so tranquil in style, we do not know; but this too, like Prendilacqua's 'Life of Vittorino da Feltre,' is a masterpiece of natural delineation. For these biographies the works of Plutarch and Suetonius served no doubt as models. Yet this does not make the preoccupation of the Italians with the phenomena of personality the less remarkable.

Another phase of the same impulse led to special treatises upon ideal characters. The picture of the perfect householder was drawn by Alberti, that of the courtier by Castiglione, that of the prince by Machiavelli. Da Vinci discoursed upon the physical proportions of the human form. Firenzuola and Luigini analysed the beauty of women; Piccolomini undertook to describe the manners of a well-bred lady; and La Casa laid down rules for polite behaviour in society. The names of treatises of this description might easily be multiplied. Enough, however, has been said to show the tendency of the Italian intellect to occupy itself with salient qualities, whether exhibited in individuals or idealised and abstracted by the reflective fancy. The whole of this literature implies an intense self-consciousness in the nation, an ardent interest in men as men, because of the specific virtue to be found in each. The spirit, therefore, in which these authors of the Renaissance approached their task was wholly different from that which induced the medi?val annalist to register the miracles of saints, to chronicle the princes of some dynasty or the abbots of a convent. Nor had it much in common with the mythologising enthusiasm of romantic poets. The desire for edification and the fire of fancy had yielded to an impulse more strictly scientific, to a curiosity more positive.

The attention directed in literature and social intercourse upon great men implied a corresponding thirst for posthumous glory as a subjective quality of the Renaissance character. To perpetuate a name and fame was the most fervent passion, shared alike by artists and princes, by men of letters and by generals. It was not enough for a man to show forth the vigour that was in him, or to win the applause of his contemporaries. He must go beyond and wrest something permanent for himself from the ideal world that will survive our transient endeavours. When Alfonso the Magnanimous employed Fazio to compose his chronicle, when Francesco Sforza paid Filelfo for his verses by the dozen, when Cosimo de' Medici regretted that he had not spent more wealth on building, when Bartolommeo Colleoni decreed the erection of his chapel at Bergamo, and his statue on the public square of Venice, these men, so different in all things else, were striving, each after his own fashion, to buy an immortality his own achievements in the field or Senate might not win. Dante, here as elsewhere the first to utter the word of the modern age, has given expression to this thirst for lasting recollection in his lines about the planet Mercury:[6]-

Questa picciola stella si correda

De' buoni spirti, che son stati attivi,

Perchè onore e fama gli succeda.

At the same time Dante, imbued with the mystic spirit of the Middle Ages, felt an antagonism between worldly ambition and the ideal of the Christian life. There are other passages, where fame is mentioned by him as a fleeting breath, a flower that blooms and fades.[7] In truth, the passionate desire for glory was part of the Renaissance worldliness, caught from communion with the classic past, and connected with that vivid apprehension of human life which gave its vigour to an age of reawakened impulses and positive ambitions. This world was so much with them, so much to them, that these men would not lose their grasp of it in death, or willingly exchange it for a paradise of hopes beyond.

The enthusiasm for antiquity coloured this desire for fame by forcing on the Italians the conviction that in culture was the real title to eternity. How could they have entered into the spiritual kingdom of the Greeks and Romans, if it had not been for MSS. and works of art? It became the fashion therefore, to seek immortality through literature. The study of the classics was not then confined to men of a peculiar bent. On all alike, even on women, there weighed the one belief that to be a scholar was the surest way of saving something from the wreck that is the doom of human deeds.[8] Only at rare intervals, and in rare natures of the type of Michael Angelo, did the Christian ideal resume its sway. Tired with the radiance of art or learning, they turned to the Cross of Christ, and laid their secular achievements down as vain and worthless. The time, however, had not yet come when a disgust of culture and an exhaustion of the intellect should make asceticism and monastic ecstasy acceptable once more. That belonged to the age of Spanish tyranny, and what is called the Counter-Reformation. For the real Renaissance Leo's memorable imprimatur, granted to the editors of Tacitus, struck the true key-note; while Sappho's solemn lines of warning to a friend careless of literature might be paraphrased to speak the feeling of Poliziano:-

Lo, thou shalt die,

And lie

Dumb in the silent tomb;

Nor of thy name

Shall there be any fame

In ages yet to be or years to come:

For of the rose

That on Pieria blows

Thou hast no share;

But in sad Hades' house,

Unknown, inglorious,

Mid the dim shades that wander there,

Shalt thou flit forth and haunt the filmy air.

These words found no uncertain echo in Renaissance Italy, where lads with long dark hair and liquid eyes left their loves to listen to a pedant's lectures, where Niccolo de' Niccoli wooed Piero de' Pazzi from a life of pleasure by the promise of a spiritual kingdom in the world of books. Piero was 'a man born with thy face and throat, Lyric Apollo!' His only object was to enjoy-darsi buon tempo, as the phrase of Florence hath it. Yet these words of the student: 'Seeing thou art the son of such a man, and of comely person, it is a shame thou dost not give thyself to learn Latin, the which would be unto thee a great ornament; and if thou dost not learn it, thou wilt be nought esteemed; the flower of youth once passed, thou wilt find thyself without virtue'-these words carried such weight, and sank so deeply into the young man's heart, that, smitten with the love of learning, he forsook his boon companions, engaged Pontano as house-tutor at a salary of one hundred golden florins, and spent his leisure time in learning Livy and the '?neid' by heart.[9] What he sought he gained; his name is still recorded, now that not only the bloom of youth, but life itself has passed away, and he has slept for nearly four centuries in Florentine earth. Yet we, no less wearied of erudition than Faust was, when he held the cup of laudanum in his hand and heard the Easter voices singing, may well ask ourselves what Piero carried with him to the grave more than Sardanapalus, over whom the Greeks inscribed their bitter epitaphs. Disenchanted and disillusioned as we are by those four centuries of learning, the musical lament of Dido and the stately periods of Latin prose are little better, considered as spiritual sustenance, to us than the husks that the swine did eat. How can we picture to ourselves the conditions of an age when scholarship was an evangel, forcing the Levis of Florence by the persuasion of its irresistible beauty to forsake the tables of the money-changers, tempting young men of great possessions to sell all and give to the Muses, making of Lucrezia Borgia herself the Magdalen of polite literature? Fortunately for the civilisation of the modern world, the men of the Renaissance, untroubled by a surfeit of knowledge, made none of these reflections. It was an age of sincere faith in the goodness and the glory of the intellect revealed by art and letters. When we read Vespasiano's account of the grey-haired Niccolo accosting the young Pazzi on the steps of the Bargello, our mind turns instinctively to an earlier dayspring of the reason in ancient Greece; we think of the charm exercised by Socrates over Critias and Alcibiades: and had an Aristophanes appeared in Italy, we fancy how he might have criticised this seduction of the youth from citizenship and arms to tranquil contemplations and the cosmopolitan interests of culture.

It is not without real reason that these Hellenic parallels confront us in the study of Italian Renaissance. Florence borrowed her light from Athens, as the moon shines with rays reflected from the sun. The Revival was the silver age of that old golden age of Greece. In a literal, not a merely metaphorical sense, the fifteenth century witnessed a new birth of the classic spirit. And what, let us ask ourselves, since here at last is the burning point of our inquiry, what was the true note of this spirit, in so far as its recovery concerned the Italian race? Superficial observers will speak of the Paganism of the Renaissance, its unblushing license, its worldliness, its self-satisfied sensuality, as though that were all, as though these qualities were not inherent in human nature, ready at any moment to emerge when the strain of nobler enthusiasm is relaxed, or the self-preservative instincts of society are enfeebled. There is indeed a truth in this rough and ready answer, which requires to be stated on the threshold. The contact of the modern with the ancient world did encourage a profligate and godless mode of living in men who preferred Petronius to S. Paul, and yearned less after Galilee than Corinth. The humanists were distinguished even above the Roman clergy for open disorder in their lives. They developed filthy speaking as a special branch of rhetoric, and professed the science of recondite and obsolete obscenity. It was just this fashion of the learned classes that made Erasmus mistrust the importation of scholarship into the North. 'One scruple still besets my mind,' he wrote, 'lest under the cloak of revived literature Paganism should strive to raise its head, there being among Christians men who, while they recognise the name of Christ, breathe in their hearts the spirit of the Gentiles.' Christianity, especially in Italy, where the spectacle of the Holy See inspired disgust, had been prostituted to the vilest service by the Church.[10] Faith was associated with folly, superstition, ignorance, intolerance, and cruelty. The manners of the clergy were in flagrant discord with the Gospel, and Antichrist found fitter incarnation in Roderigo Borgia than in Nero. While the essence of religion was thus sacrificed by its professors, there appeared upon the horizon of the modern world, like some bright blazing star, the ideal of that Pagan civilisation against which in its decadence the ascendant force of Christianity had striven. It was not unnatural that a reaction in favour of Paganism, now that the Church had been found wanting, should ensue, or that the passions of humanity should justify their self-indulgence by appealing to the precedents of Greece and Rome. Good and bad were mingled in the classical tradition. Vices, loathsome enough in a Pope who had instituted the censure of the press, seemed venial when combined with the manliness of Hadrian or the refined charm of Catullus. Sin itself lost half its evil coming from the new-found Holy Land of culture. Still this so-called Paganism of the Renaissance, real as it was, had but a superficial connection with classical studies. The corruption of the Church and the political degeneracy of the commonwealths had quite as much to do with it as the return to heathen standards. Nor could the Renaissance have been the great world-historical era it truly was, if such demoralisation had been a part and parcel of its essence. Crimes and vices are not the hotbed of arts and literature: lustful priests and cruel despots were not necessary to the painting of Raphael or the poetry of Ariosto. The faults of the Italians in the age of the Renaissance were neither productive of their high achievements, nor conversely were they generated by the motion of the intellect toward antique forms of culture. The historian notes synchronisms, whereof he is not bound to prove the interdependence, and between which he may feel there is no causal link.

It does not, moreover, appear that the demoralisation of Italian society, however this may have been brought about, produced either physical or intellectual degeneration in the people. Commercial prosperity, indeed, had rendered them inferior in brute strength to their semi-barbarous neighbours; while the cosmopolitan interests of culture had destroyed the energy of national instincts. But it would be wrong to charge their neopaganism alone with results whereof the causes were so complex.

Meanwhile, what gave its deep importance to the classical revival, was the emancipation of the reason, consequent upon the discovery that the best gifts of the spirit had been enjoyed by the nations of antiquity. An ideal of existence distinct from that imposed upon the Middle Ages by the Church, was revealed in all its secular attractiveness. Fresh value was given to the desires and aims, enjoyments and activities of man, considered as a noble member of the universal life, and not as a diseased excrescence on the world he helped to spoil. Instead of the cloistral service of the 'Imitatio Christi,' that conception of communion, through knowledge, with God manifested in His works and in the soul of man, which forms the indestructible religion of science and the reason, was already generated. The intellect, after lying spell-bound during a long night, when thoughts were as dreams and movement as somnambulism, resumed its activity, interrogated nature, and enjoyed the pleasures of unimpeded energy. Without ceasing to be Christians (for the moral principles of Christianity are the inalienable possession of the human race), the men of the Revival dared once again to exercise their thought as boldly as the Greeks and Romans had done before them. More than this, they were now able, as it were, by the resuscitation of a lost faculty, to do so freely and clear-sightedly. The touch upon them of the classic spirit was like the finger of a deity giving life to the dead.

That more and nobler use was not made of the new light which dawned upon the world in the Revival; that the humanists abandoned the high standpoint of Petrarch for a lower and more literary level; that society assimilated the Hedonism more readily than the Stoicism of the ancients; that scholars occupied themselves with the form rather than the matter of the classics; that all these shortcomings in their several degrees prevented the Italians from leading the intellectual movement of the sixteenth century in religion and philosophy, as they had previously led the mind of Europe in discovery and literature-is deeply to be lamented by those who are jealous for their honour. For the rest, no words can be found more worthy to express their high conception of man, regarded as a free yet responsible personality, sent into the world to mould his own nature, and by this power of self-determination severed from both brutes and angels, than the following passage from Pico della Mirandola's 'Oration on the Dignity of Man.' It combines antique liberty of thought with Christian faith in a style distinctive of the Renaissance at its best; nor is its note of medi?val cosmology uncharacteristic of an age that divined as yet more than it firmly grasped the realities of modern science. Here, if anywhere, may be hailed the Epiphany of the modern spirit, contraposing God and man in a relation inconceivable to the ancients, unapprehended in its fulness by the Middle Ages. 'Then the Supreme Maker decreed that unto Man, on whom He could bestow nought singular, should belong in common whatsoever had been given, to His other creatures. Therefore He took man, made in His own individual image, and having placed him in the centre of the world, spake to him thus: "Neither a fixed abode, nor a form in thine own likeness, nor any gift peculiar to thyself alone, have we given thee, O Adam, in order that what abode, what likeness, what gifts thou shalt choose, may be thine to have and to possess. The nature allotted to all other creatures, within laws appointed by ourselves, restrains them. Thou, restrained by no narrow bounds, according to thy own free will, in whose power I have placed thee, shalt define thy nature for thyself. I have set thee midmost the world, that thence thou mightest the more conveniently survey whatsoever is in the world. Nor have we made thee either heavenly or earthly, mortal or immortal, to the end that thou, being, as it were, thy own free maker and moulder, shouldst fashion thyself in what form may like thee best. Thou shalt have power to decline unto the lower or brute creatures. Thou shalt have power to be reborn unto the higher, or divine, according to the sentence of thy intellect." Thus to Man, at his birth, the Father gave seeds of all variety and germs of every form of life.'

Out of thoughts like these, if Italy could only have been free, if her society could have been uncorrupted, if her Church could have returned to the essential truths of Christianity, might have sprung, as from a seed, the noblest growth of human science. But dis aliter visum est. The prologue to this history of culture-the long account taken of selfish tyrants, vicious clergy, and incapable republics, in my 'Age of the Despots'-is intended to make it clear why the conditions under which the Revival began in Italy rendered its accomplishment imperfect.

* * *

Importance of the Revival of Learning-Medi?val Romance-The Legend of Faustus-Its Value for the Renaissance-The Devotion of Italy to Study-Italian Predisposition for this Labour-Scholarship in the Dark Ages-Double Attitude assumed by the Church-Piety for Virgil-Meagre Acquaintance with the Latin Classics-No Greek Learning-The Spiritual Conditions of the Middle Ages adverse to Pure Literature-Italy no exception to the rest of Europe-Dante and Petrarch-Definition of Humanism-Petrarch's Conception of it-His ?sthetical Temperament-His Cult for Cicero, Zeal in collecting Manuscripts, Sense of the Im

portance of Greek Studies-Warfare against Pedantry and Superstition-Ideal of Poetry and Rhetoric-Critique of Jurists and Schoolmen-S. Augustine-Petrarch's Vanity-Thirst for Fame-Discord between his Life and his Profession-His Literary Temperament-Visionary Patriotism-His Influence-His Successors-Boccaccio and Greek Studies-Translation of Homer-Philosophy of Literature-Sensuousness of Boccaccio's Inspiration-Giovanni da Ravenna-The Wandering Professor-His Pupils in Latin Scholarship-Luigi Marsigli-The Convent of S. Spirito-Humanism in Politics-Coluccio de' Salutati-Gasparino da Barzizza-Improved Style in Letter-writing-Revival of Greek Learning-Manuel Chrysoloras-His Pupils-Lionardo Bruni-Value of Greek for the Renaissance.

I have already observed that it would be inaccurate to identify the whole movement of the Renaissance with the process whereby the European nations recovered and appropriated the masterpieces of Greek and Latin literature. At the same time this reconquest of the classic world of thought was by far the most important achievement of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It absorbed nearly the whole mental energy of the Italians, and determined in a great measure the quality of all their intellectual production in the period I have undertaken to illustrate. Through their activity in the field of scholarship the proper starting-point was given to the modern intellect. The revelation of what men were and what they wrought under the influence of other faiths and other impulses, in distant ages with a different ideal for their aim, not only widened the narrow horizon of the Middle Ages, but it also restored self-confidence to the reason of humanity. Research and criticism began to take the place of scholastic speculation. Positive knowledge was substituted for the intuitive guesses of idealists and dreamers. The interests of this world received their due share of attention, and the litter? humaniores of the student usurped upon the divinarum rerum cognitio of theologians.

All through the Middle Ages uneasy and imperfect memories of Greece and Rome had haunted Europe. Alexander, the great conqueror; Hector, the noble knight and lover; Helen, who set Troy town on fire; Virgil, the magician; Dame Venus lingering about the hill of H?rsel-these phantoms, whereof the positive historic truth was lost, remained to sway the soul and stimulate desire in myth and saga. Deprived of actual knowledge, imagination transformed what it remembered of the classic age into romance. The fascination exercised by these dreams of a half-forgotten past over the medi?val fancy expressed itself in the legend of Doctor Faustus. That legend tells us what the men upon the eve of the Revival longed for, and what they dreaded, when they turned their minds towards the past. The secret of enjoyment and the source of strength possessed by the ancients, allured them; but they believed that they could only recover this lost treasure by the suicide of their soul. So great was the temptation that Faustus paid the price. After imbibing all the knowledge of his age, he sold himself to the Devil, in order that his thirst for experience might be quenched, his grasp upon the world be strengthened, and the ennui of his inactivity be soothed. His first use of this dearly-bought power was to make blind Homer sing to him. Amphion tunes his harp in concert with Mephistopheles. Alexander rises from the dead at his behest, with all his legionaries; and Helen is given to him for a bride. Faustus is therefore a parable of the impotent yearnings of the spirit in the Middle Ages-its passionate aspiration, its conscience-stricken desire, its fettered curiosity amid the cramping limits of imperfect knowledge and irrational dogmatism. That for which Faustus sold his soul, the freedom he acquired by magic, the sense of beauty he gratified through visions, the knowledge he gained by interrogation of demons, was yielded to the world without price at the time of the Renaissance. Homer, no longer by the intervention of a fiend, but by the labour of the scholar, sang to the new age. The pomp of the empires of the old world was restored in the pages of historians. The indestructible beauty of Greek art, whereof Helen was an emblem, became, through the discovery of classic poetry and sculpture, the possession of the modern world. Medi?valism took this Helen to wife, and their offspring, the Euphorion of Goethe's drama, is the spirit of the modern world. But how was this effected? By long and toilsome study, by the accumulation of MSS., by the acquisition of dead languages, by the solitary labour of grammarians, by the lectures of itinerant professors, by the scribe, by the printing press, by the self-devotion of magnificent Italy to erudition. In this way the Renaissance realised the dream of the Middle Ages, and the genius of the Italians wrought by solid toil what the myth-making imagination of the Germans had projected in a poem.

It is impossible to exaggerate the benefit conferred upon Europe by the Italians at this epoch. The culture of the classics had to be reappropriated before the movement of the modern mind could begin: before the nations could start upon a new career of progress, the chasm between the old and new world had to be bridged over. This task of reappropriation the Italians undertook alone, and achieved at the sacrifice of their literary independence and their political freedom. The history of Renaissance literature in Italy is the history of a national genius deviating from the course of self-development into the channels of scholarship and antiquarian research. The language created by Dante as a thing of power, polished by Petrarch as a thing of beauty, trained by Boccaccio as the instrument of melodious prose, was abandoned even by the Tuscans in the fifteenth century for revived Latin and newly-discovered Greek. Patent acquisition took the place of proud inventiveness; laborious imitation of classical authors suppressed originality of style. The force of mind which in the fourteenth century had produced a 'Divine Comedy' and a 'Decameron,' in the fifteenth was expended upon the interpretation of codices, the settlement of texts, the translation of Greek books into Latin, the study of antiquities, the composition of commentaries, encyclop?dias, dictionaries, ephemerides. While we regret this change from creative to acquisitive literature, we must bear in mind that those scholars who ought to have been poets accomplished nothing less than the civilisation, or, to use their own phrase, the humanisation, of the modern world.[11] At the critical moment when the Eastern Empire was being shattered by the Turks, and when the other European nations were as yet unfit for culture, Italy saved the arts and sciences of Greece and Rome, and interpreted the spirit of the classics. Devoting herself to what appears the slavish work of compilation and collection, she transmitted an inestimable treasure to the human race; and though for a time the beautiful Italian tongue was superseded by a jargon of dead languages, yet the literature of the Renaissance yielded in the end the poetry of Ariosto, the political philosophy of Machiavelli, the histories of Guicciardini and Varchi. Meanwhile the whole of Europe had received the staple of its intellectual education.

It is necessary to repeat the observation that this absorption of energy in the task of scholarship was no less natural to the Italians than necessary for the world at large. The Italians were not a new nation like the Franks and Germans. Nothing is more remarkable in the medi?val history of Italy than the sense, shared alike by poets and jurists, by the leaders of popular insurrections and the moulders of philosophic thought, that the centre of national vitality existed in the Roman Empire. It was this determination to look backward rather than forward, to trust the past rather than the present, that neutralised the forces of the Lombard League, and prevented the communes from asserting their independence face to face with foreigners who claimed to be the representatives of C?sar. The Italians, unlike any other European people, sacrificed the reality of political freedom for the idea of majesty and glory, to be recovered by the restitution of the Empire. Guelf and Ghibelline coincided in this delusion, that Rome, whether Papal or Imperial, was destined still to place the old Italic stock upon the throne of civilised humanity. When the three great authors of the thirteenth century appeared, each in turn cast his eyes to ancient Rome as the true source of national greatness. The language of modern Italy was known to be a scion of the Latin speech, and the Italians called themselves Latini. The attempt to conform their literature to the Roman type was therefore felt to be but a return to its true standard; the '?neid' of Virgil was their Nibelungen-Lied. Thus the humanistic enthusiasm of the fifteenth century assumed an almost patriotic character. In it, moreover, the doctrine that had ruled the Middle Ages, interrupting political cohesion without acquiring the consistency of fact, attained at last its proper sphere of development. The ideal of Dante in the 'De Monarchia' had proved a baseless dream; no emperor was destined to take his seat in Rome and sway the world. But the ideal of Petrarch was realised; the scholars, animated by his impulse, reacquired the birthright of culture which belonged of old to Italy, and made her empress of the intellect for Europe. Not political but spiritual supremacy was the real heritage of these new Romans.

As an introduction to the history of the Revival, and in order that the work to be performed by the Italian students may be accurately measured, it will be necessary to touch briefly upon the state of scholarship during the dark ages. To underrate the achievement of that period, especially in logic, theology, and law, is only too easy, seeing that a new direction was given to the mind of Europe by the Renaissance, and that we have moved continuously on other lines to other objects since the opening of the fifteenth century. Medi?val thought was both acute and strenuous in its own region of activity. What it lacked was material outside the speculative sphere to feed upon. Culture, in our sense of the word, did not exist, and the intellect was forced to deal subtly with a very limited class of conceptions.

Long before the fall of the Roman Empire it became clear that both fine arts and literature were gradually declining. Sculpture in the age of Constantine had lost distinction of style; and though the practice of verse survived as a rhetorical exercise, no works of original genius were produced. Ausonius and Claudian, just before the division of the Empire and the irruption of the barbarian races, uttered the last swan's note of classic poetry. Meanwhile true taste and criticism were extinct.[12] The Church, while battling with Paganism, recognised her deadliest foes in literature. Not only were the Greek and Latin masterpieces the stronghold of a mythology that had to be erased from the popular mind; not only was their morality antagonistic to the principles of Christian ethics: in addition to these grounds for hatred and mistrust, the classics idealised a form of human life which the new faith regarded as worthless. What was culture in comparison with the salvation of the soul? Why should time be spent upon the dreams of poets, when every minute might be well employed in pondering the precepts of the Gospels? What was the use of making this life refined and agreeable by study, when it formed but an insignificant prelude to an eternity wherein mere mundane learning would be valueless? Why raise questions about man's condition on this earth, when the creeds had to be defined and expounded, when the nature of God and the relation of the human soul to its Creator had to be established? It was easy to pass from this state of mind to the belief that learning in itself was impious.[13] 'Let us shun the lying fables of the poets,' cries Gregory of Tours, 'and forego the wisdom of sages at enmity with God, lest we incur the doom of endless death by sentence of our Lord.' Even Augustine deplored his time spent in reading Virgil, weeping over Dido's death by love, when all the while he was himself both morally and spiritually dead. Alcuin regretted that in his boyhood he had preferred Virgil to the legends of the Saints, and stigmatised the eloquence of the Latin writers by the epithet of wanton. Such phrases as poetarum figmenta, gentilium figmenta sive deliramenta (the fictions or mad ravings of Pagan poets) are commonly employed by Christian authors of the Lives of Saints, in order to mark the inferiority of Virgil and Ovid to their own more edifying compositions. Relying on their spiritual pretensions, the monkish scribes gloried in ignorance and paraded want of grammar as a sign of grace. 'I warn the curious reader,' writes a certain Wolfhard in the 'Life of S. Walpurgis,' 'not to mind the mass of barbarisms in this little work; I bid him ponder what he finds upon these pages, and seek the pearl within the dung-heap.' Gregory the Great goes further, and defies the pedantry of pedagogues. 'The place of prepositions and the cases of the nouns I utterly despise, since I deem it unfit to confine the words of the celestial oracle within the rules of Donatus.' 'Let philosophers and impure scholars of Donatus,' writes a fanatic of Cordova, 'ply their windy problems with the barking of dogs, the grunting of swine, snarling with skinned throat and teeth; let the foaming and bespittled grammarians belch, while we remain evangelical servants of Christ, true followers of rustic teachers.' Thus the opposition of the Church to Paganism, the conviction that Christianity was alien to culture, and the absorption of intellectual interest in theological questions contributed to destroy what had remained of sound scholarship in the last years of the Empire. The task of the Church, moreover, in the Middle Ages was not so much to keep learning alive as to moralise the savage races who held Europe at their pleasure. Pure Latinity, even if it could have been instilled into the nations of the North, was of less moment than elementary discipline in manners and religion. It must not be forgotten that the literature of ancient Rome was artificial in its best days, confined to a select few, and dependent on the capital for its support. After the dismemberment of the Empire the whole of Europe was thrown open to the action of spiritual powers who had to use unlettered barbarians for their ministers and missionaries. To submit this vast field to classic culture at the same time that Christianity was being propagated, would have been beyond the strength of the Church, even had she chosen to undertake this task, and had the vital forces of antiquity not been exhausted.

At this point an inevitable reaction, illustrating the compromise thrust upon the Church by her peculiar position, made itself apparent. In proportion as the dangers of Paganism decreased, the clergy, on whom devolved the double duty of civilising as well as moralising society, began to feel the need of arresting the advance of ignorance. Knowledge of Latin was required for ecclesiastical uses, for the interpretation of Scripture, for the study of the Fathers, and for the establishment of a common language among many divers nationalities. A middle course between the fanaticism which regarded classical literature as worthless and impure, and the worldliness that might have been encouraged by enthusiasm for the ancients, had therefore to be steered. Grammar was taught in the schools, and where grammar was taught, it was impossible to exclude Virgil and some other Latin authors. A conflict in the monkish mind was the unavoidable consequence. Since the classics alone communicated sound learning, the study of them formed a necessary part of education; and yet these authors were unbaptized Pagans, doomed to everlasting death because of their impiety and immorality. Poets who had hitherto been regarded as deadly foes, were now accepted as auxiliaries in the battle of the Church against barbarism. While copying the elegies of Ovid, the compassionate scribe sought to place them in a favourable light, and to render them edifying at the cost of contradicting their plain meaning.[14] Virgil was credited with allegorical significance; and the strong sympathy he roused in those who felt the beauty of his style, produced a belief that, if not quite, he was almost a Christian. The piety and pity for Virgil as a gentle soul who had just missed the salvation offered by Christ, found expression in the service for S. Paul's Day used at Mantua:[15]-

Ad Maronis mausoleum

Ductus, fudit super eum

Pi? rorem lacrym?;

Quem te, inquit, reddidissem

Si te vivum invenissem,

Poetarum maxime!

Meanwhile the utter confusion consequent upon the downfall of the Roman Empire and the irruption of the Germanic races was causing, by the mere brute force of circumstance, a gradual extinction of scholarship too powerful to be arrested. The teaching of grammar for ecclesiastical purposes was insufficient to check the influence of many causes leading to this overthrow of learning. It was impossible to communicate more than a mere tincture of knowledge to students separated from the classical tradition, for whom the antecedent history of Rome was a dead letter. The meaning of Latin words derived from the Greek was lost. Smaragdus, a grammarian, mistook Eunuchus Com?dia and Orestes Trag?dia, mentioned by Donatus, for the names of authors. Remigius of Auxerre explained poema by positio, and emblema by habundantia. Homer and Virgil were supposed to have been friends and contemporaries, while the Latin epitome of the 'Iliad,' bearing the name of Pindar, was fathered on the Theban lyrist. Theological notions, grotesque and childish beyond description, found their way into etymology and grammar. The three persons of the Trinity were discovered in the verb, and mystic numbers in the parts of speech. Thus analytical studies like that of language came to be regarded as an open field for the exercise of the mythologising fancy; and etymology was reduced to a system of ingenious punning. Voluntas and voluptas were distinguished, for example, as pertaining to the nature of Deus and diabolus respectively; and, in order to make the list complete, voluntas was invented as an attribute of homo. It is clear that on this path of verbal quibbling the intellect had lost tact, taste, and common sense together.

When the minds of the learned were possessed by these absurdities to the exclusion of sound method, we cannot wonder that antiquity survived but as a strange and shadowy dream in popular imagination. Virgil, the only classic who retained distinct and living personality, passed from poet to philosopher, from philosopher to Sibyl, from Sibyl to magician, by successive stages of transmutation, as the truth about him grew more dim and the faculty to apprehend him weakened. Forming the staple of education in the schools of the grammarians, and metamorphosed by the vulgar consciousness into a wizard,[16] he waited on the extreme verge of the dark ages to take Dante by the hand, and lead him, as the type of human reason, through the realms of Hell and Purgatory.

With regard to the actual knowledge of Latin literature possessed in the Middle Ages, it may be said in brief that Virgil was continually studied, and that a certain familiarity with Ovid, Lucan, Horace, Juvenal, and Statius was never lost. Among the prose-writers, portions of Cicero were used in education; but the compilations of Boethius, Priscian, Donatus, and Cassiodorus were more widely used. In the twelfth century the study of Roman law was revived, and the scholastic habit of thought found scope for subtlety in the discussion of cases and composition of glosses. The general knowledge and intellectual sympathy required for comprehension of the genuine classics were, however, wanting; and thus it happened that their place was taken by epitomes and abstracts, and by the formal digests of the Western Empire in its decadence. This lifeless literature was better suited to the meagre intellectual conditions of the Middle Ages than the masterpieces of the Augustan and Silver periods.

Of Greek there was absolutely no tradition left.[17] When the names of Greek poets or philosophers are cited by medi?val authors, it is at second hand from Latin sources; and the Aristotelian logic of the schoolmen came through Latin translations made by Jews from Arabian MSS. Occasionally it might happen that a Western scholar acquired Greek at Constantinople or in the south of Italy, where it was spoken; but this did not imply Hellenic culture, nor did such knowledge form a part and parcel of his erudition. Greek was hardly less lost to Europe then than Sanskrit in the first half of the eighteenth century.

The meagreness of medi?val learning was, however, a less serious obstacle to culture than the habit of mind, partly engendered by Christianity and partly idiosyncratic to the new races, which prevented students from appreciating the true spirit of the classics. While mysticism and allegory ruled supreme, the clearly-defined humanity of the Greeks and Romans could not fail to be misapprehended. The little that was known of them reached students through a hazy and distorting medium. Poems like Virgil's fourth Eclogue were prized for what the author had not meant when he was writing them; while his real interests were utterly neglected. Against this mental misconception, this original obliquity of vision, this radical lie in the intellect, the restorers of learning had to fight at least as energetically as against brute ignorance and dulness. It was not enough to multiply books and to discover codices; they had to teach men how to read them, to explain their inspiration, to defend them against prejudice, to protect them from false methods of interpretation. To purge the mind of fancy and fable, to prove that poetry apart from its supposed prophetic meaning was delightful for its own sake, and that the history of the antique nations, in spite of Paganism, could be used for profit and instruction, was the first step to be taken by these pioneers of modern culture. They had, in short, to create a new mental sensibility by establishing the truth that pure literature directly contributes to the dignity and happiness of human beings. The achievement of this revolution in thought was the great performance of the Italians in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

During the dark ages Italy had in no sense enjoyed superiority of culture over the rest of Europe. On the contrary, the first abortive attempt at a revival of learning was due to Charlemagne at Aix, the second to the Emperor Frederick in Apulia and Sicily; and while the Romance nations had lost the classical tradition, it was still to some extent preserved by the Moslem dynasties. The more we study the history of medi?val learning, the more we recognise the debt of civilised humanity to the Arabs for their conservation and transmission of Greek thought in altered form to Europe. Yet, though the Italians came comparatively late into the field, their action was decisive. Neither Charlemagne nor Frederick, neither the philosophy of the Arabian sages nor the precocious literature of Provence, succeeded in effecting for the education of the modern intellect that which Dante and Petrarch performed-the one by the production of a monumental work of art in poetry, the other by the communication of a new enthusiasm for antiquity to students.

Dante does not belong in any strict sense to the history of the Revival of Learning. The 'Divine Comedy' closes the Middle Ages and preserves their spirit. It stands before the vestibule of modern literature like a solitary mountain at the entrance of a country rich in all varieties of landscape. In order to become acquainted with its grandeur, we must leave the fields and forests that we know, ascend the heights, and use ourselves to an austerer climate. In spite of this isolation, Dante's influence was powerful upon succeeding generations. The modern mind first found in him its scope, and recognised its freedom; first dared and did what placed it on a level with antiquity in art. Many ideas, moreover, destined to play an important part in the coming age, received from him their germinal expression. It may thus be truly said that Dante initiated the movement of the modern intellect in its entirety, though he did not lead the Revival considered as a separate moment in this evolution. That service was reserved for Petrarch.

There are spots upon the central watershed of Europe where, in the stillness of a summer afternoon, the traveller may listen to the murmurs of two streams-the one hurrying down to form the Rhine, the other to contribute to the Danube or the Po. Born within hearing of each other's voices, and nourished by the self-same clouds that rest upon the crags around them, they are henceforth destined to an ever-widening separation. While the one sweeps onward to the Northern seas, the other will reach the shores of Italy or Greece and mingle with the Mediterranean. To these two streamlets we might compare Dante and Petrarch, both of whom sprang from Florence, both of whom were nurtured in the learning of the schools and in the lore of chivalrous love. Yet how different was their mission! Petrarch marks the rising of that great river of intellectual energy which flowed southward to recover the culture of the ancient world. The current of Dante's genius took the contrary direction. Borne upon its mighty flood, we visit the lands and cities of the Middle Ages, floating toward infinities divined and made the heritage of human nature by the medi?val spirit.

In speaking of Petrarch here, it is necessary to concentrate attention upon his claims to be considered as the apostle of scholarship, the inaugurator of the humanistic impulse of the fifteenth century. We have nothing to do with his Italian poetry. The Rime dedicated to Madonna Laura have eclipsed the fame of the Latin epic, philosophical discourses, epistles, orations, invectives, and dissertations, which made Petrarch the Voltaire of his own age, and on which he thought his immortality would rest. Yet it is with these latter products of his genius, not with the Canzoniere, that we are now concerned; nor can it be too emphatically asserted that his originality was even more eminently displayed in the revelation of humanism to the modern world than in the verses that impressed their character upon Italian literature. To have foreseen a whole new phase of European culture, to have interpreted its spirit, and determined by his own activity the course it should pursue, is in truth a higher title to fame than the composition of even the most perfect sonnets. The artist, however, has this advantage over the pioneer of intellectual progress, that his delicate creations are indestructible, and that his work cannot be merged in that of a continuator. Therefore Petrarch lives and will live in the memory of millions as the poet of Laura, while only students know how much the world owes to his humanistic ardour.

As I cannot dispense with the word Humanism in this portion of my work, it may be well to fix the sense I shall attach to it.[18] The essence of humanism consisted in a new and vital perception of the dignity of man as a rational being apart from theological determinations, and in the further perception that classic literature alone displayed human nature in the plenitude of intellectual and moral freedom. It was partly a reaction against ecclesiastical despotism, partly an attempt to find the point of unity for all that had been thought and done by man, within the mind restored to consciousness of its own sovereign faculty. Hence the single-hearted devotion to the literature of Greece and Rome that marks the whole Renaissance era. Hence the watchword of that age, the Litter? Humaniores. Hence the passion for antiquity, possessing thoughtful men, and substituting a new authority for the traditions of the Church. Hence the so-called Paganism of centuries bent upon absorbing and assimilating a spirit no less life-giving from their point of view than Christianity itself. Hence the persistent effort of philosophers to find the meeting-point of two divergent inspirations. Hence, too, the ultimate antagonism between the humanists, or professors of the new wisdom, and those uncompromising Christians who, like S. Paul, preferred to remain fools for Christ's sake.

Humanism in this, the widest, sense of the word was possessed by Petrarch intuitively. It belonged to his nature as much as music to Mozart; so that he seemed sent into the world to raise, by the pure exercise of innate faculties, a standard for succeeding workers. Physically and ?sthetically, by the fineness of his ear for verbal harmonies, and by the exquisiteness of his sensibilities, he was fitted to divine what it took centuries to verify. While still a boy, long before he could grasp the meaning of classical Latin, he used to read the prose of Cicero aloud, delighting in the sonorous cadence and balanced periods of the master's style.[19] Nor were the moral qualities of industry and perseverance, needed to supplement these natural gifts, defective. In his maturity he spared no pains to collect the manuscripts of Cicero, sometimes transcribing them with his own hand, sometimes employing copyists, sending and journeying to distant parts of Europe where he heard a fragment of his favourite author might be found.[20] His greatest literary disappointment was the loss of a treatise by Cicero on Glory, a theme exceedingly significant for the Renaissance, which he lent to his tutor Convennevole, and which the old man pawned.[21] Though he could not read Greek, he welcomed with profoundest reverence the codices of Homer and Plato sent to him from Constantinople, and exhorted Boccaccio to dedicate his genius to the translation of the sovran poet into Latin.[22] In this susceptibility to the melodies of rhetorical prose, in this special cult of Cicero, in the passion for collecting manuscripts, and in the intuition that the future of scholarship depended upon the resuscitation of Greek studies, Petrarch initiated the four most important momenta of the classical Renaissance. He, again, was the first to understand the value of public libraries;[23] the first to accumulate coins and inscriptions, as the sources of accurate historical information; the first to preach the duty of preserving ancient monuments. It would seem as though, by the instinct of genius, he foresaw the future for at least three centuries, and comprehended the highest uses whereof scholarship is capable.

So far the outside only of Petrarch's instinct for humanism has been touched. How fully he possessed its large and liberal spirit is shown by the untiring war he carried on against formalism, tradition, pedantry, and superstition. Whatever might impede the free play of the intellect aroused his bitterest hatred. Against the narrow views of scholastic theologians, against the futile preoccupations of the Middle-Age materialists, against the lawyers and physicians and astrologers in vogue, he declared inexorable hostility.[24] These men, by their puerilities and falsities, obstructed the natural action of the mind; therefore Petrarch attacked them. At the same time he recognised the liberators of the reason by a kind of tact. Though he could not interpret the sixteen dialogues of Plato he possessed in Greek, he perceived intuitively that Plato, as opposed to Aristotle, would become the saint of liberal philosophy, surveyed by him as in a Pisgah-view. His enthusiasm for Cicero and Virgil was twofold; in both respects he proved how capable he was of moulding the taste and directing the mental force of his successors. As an artist, he discerned in their style the harmonies of sound and the proprieties of diction, whereby Latin might once again become the language of fine thoughts and delicate emotions. As a champion of intellectual independence, he saw that, studying their large discourse of all things which the reason and imagination can appropriate, the thinkers of the modern age might shake off scholastic fetters, and enter into the inheritance of spiritual freedom. Poetry and rhetoric he regarded not merely as the fine arts of literature, but as two chief instruments whereby the man of genius arrives at self-expression, perpetuates the qualities of his own soul, and impresses his character upon the age. Since this realisation of the individual in a high and puissant work of art appeared to him the noblest aim of man on earth, it followed that the inspired speech of the poet and the eloquence of the orator became for Petrarch the summit of ambition, the two-peaked Parnassus he struggled through his lifetime to ascend.[25] The ideal was literary; but literature implied for Petrarch more than words and phrases. It was not enough to make melodious verse, or to move an audience with well-sounding periods. The hexameters of the epic and the paragraphs of the oration had to contain solid thought, to be the genuine outcome of the poet's or the rhetorician's soul. The writer was bound to be a preacher, to discover truth, and make the truths he found agreeable to the world.[26] His life, moreover, ought to be in perfect harmony with all he sought to teach.[27] Upon the purity of his enthusiasm, the sincerity of his inspiration, depended the future well-being of the world for which he laboured.[28] Thus for this one man at least the art of letters was a priesthood; and the earnestness of his vocation made him fit to be the master of succeeding ages. It is not easy for us to appreciate the boldness and sincerity of these conceptions. Many of them, since the days of Petrarch, have been overstrained and made ridiculous by false pretensions. Besides, the whole point of view has been appropriated; and men invariably undervalue what they feel they cannot lose. It is only by comparing Petrarch's own philosophy of literature with the dulness of the schoolmen in their decadence, and with the stylistic shallowness of subsequent scholars, that we come to comprehend how luminous and novel was the thesis he supported.

Having thus conceived of literature, Petrarch obtained a standard for estimating the barren culture of his century. He taxed the disputations of the doctors with lifeless repetition unmeaning verbiage. Schoolman after schoolman had been occupied with formal trifles. The erudition of the jurist and the theologian revealed nothing fruitful for the heart or intellect; and everything was valueless that did not come straight from a man's soul, speaking to the soul of one who heard him. At the same time he read the Fathers and the Scriptures in a new light. Augustine, some few of whose sentences had been used as links in the catena of dogmatic orthodoxy, seemed to Petrarch no longer a mere master of theology, but a man conversing with him across the chasm of eight centuries. In the 'Confessions,' 'running over with a fount of tears,' the poet of Vaucluse divined a kindred nature; one who used exalted eloquence for the expression of vital thoughts and passionate emotions; one, moreover, who had reached the height of human happiness in union with God.[29] Not less real was the grasp he laid upon the prophets and apostles of the Bible. All words that bore a message to his heart were words of authority and power. The ipse dixit of an Aristotle or a Seraphic doctor had for him no weight, unless it came home to him as a man.[30] Even Cicero and Seneca, the saints of philosophical antiquity, he dared to criticise for practising less wisdom than they preached.[31]

While regarding Petrarch as the first and, in some respects, the greatest of the humanists, we are bound to recognise the faults as well as the good qualities he shared with them. To dwell on these in detail would be a thankless task, were it not for the conviction that his personality impressed itself too strongly on the fourteenth century to escape our criticism. We cannot afford to leave even the foibles of the man who gave a pattern to his generation unstudied. Foremost among these may be reckoned his vanity, his eagerness to grasp the poet's crown, his appetite for flattery, his restless change from place to place in search of new admirers, his self-complacent garrulity. This vanity was perhaps inseparable from the position he assumed upon the threshold of the modern world. It was hardly possible that the prophet of a new phase of culture should not look down with contempt upon the uneducated masses, and believe that learning raised a man into a demigod. Study of the classics taught him to despise his age and yearn for immortality; but the assurance of the honours that he sought, could only come to him upon the lips of his contemporaries. In conflict with the dulness and the darkness of preceding centuries, he felt the need of a new motive, unrecognised by the Church and banished from the cloister. That motive was the thirst for fame, the craving to make his personality eternal in the minds of men. Meanwhile he was alone in a dim wilderness of transitory interests and sordid aims, where human life was shadowy, and where, when death arrived, there would remain no memory of what had been. The gloom of this present in contrast with the glory of the past he studied, and the glory of the future he desired, confirmed his egotism. His name and fame depended on his self-assertion. To achieve renown by writing, to wrest for himself even in his lifetime a firm place among the immortals, became his feverish spur to action. He was conscious how deep a hold the passion for celebrity had taken on his nature; and not unfrequently he speaks of it as a disease.[32] The Christian within him wrestled vigorously with the renascent Pagan. Religion taught him to renounce what ambition prompted him to grasp. Yet he continued to deceive himself. While penning dissertations on the worthlessness of praise and the futility of fame, he trimmed his sails to catch the breeze of popular applause; and as his reputation widened, his desires grew ever stronger. The last years of his life were spent in writing epistles to the great men of the past, in whom alone he recognised his equals, and to posterity, in whom he hoped to meet at last with judges worthy of him.

This almost morbid vanity, peculiar to Petrarch's temperament and encouraged by the circumstances of his life, introduced a division between his practice and his profession. He was never tired of praising solitude, and many years of his manhood he spent in actual retirement at Vaucluse.[33] Yet he only loved seclusion as a contrast to the society of Courts, and would have been most miserable if the world, taking him at his own estimate, had left him in peace. No one wrote more eloquently about equal friendship, or professed a stronger zeal for candid criticism. Yet he admitted few but professed admirers to his intimacy, and regarded his literary antagonists as personal detractors. The same sensitive egotism led him to depreciate the fame of Dante, in whom he cannot but have recognised a poet in the highest sense superior to himself.[34] Again, while he complained of celebrity as an obstacle to studious employment, he showed the most acute interest when the details of his life were called in question.[35] Nothing, if we took his philosophic treatises for record, would have pleased him better than to live unnoticed. His letters make it manifest that he believed the eyes of the whole world were fixed upon him, and that he courted this attention of the public with a greedy appetite.

These qualities and contradictions mark Petrarch as a man of letters, not of action. He belonged essentially to the genus irritabile vatum, for whom the sphere of thoughts expressed on paper is more vivid than the world of facts. We may trace a corresponding weakness in his chief enthusiasms. Unable to distinguish between the realities of existence and the dreamland of his study, he hailed in Rienzi the restorer of old Rome, while he stigmatised his friends the Colonnesi as barbarian intruders.[36] The Rome he read of in the pages of Livy, seemed to the imagination of this visionary still alive and powerful; nor did he feel the absurdity of addressing the medi?val rabble of the Romans in phrases high-flown for a Gracchus.[37] While he courted the intimacy of the Correggi, and lived as a house-guest with the Visconti, he denounced these princes as tyrants, and appealed to the Emperor to take the reins and bring all Italy beneath his yoke.[38] Herein, it may be urged, Petrarch did but share a delusion common to his age. This is true; but the point to notice is the contradiction between his theories and the habits of his life. He was not a partisan on the Ghibelline side, but a believer in impossible ideals. His patriotism was no less literary than his temperament. The same tendency to measure all things by a student's standard made him exaggerate mere verbal eloquence. Words, according to his view, were power. Cicero held the highest place in his esteem, because his declamation was most copious. Aristotle, in spite of his profound philosophy, was censured for his lack of rhetoric.[39] Throughout the studied works of Petrarch we can trace this vice of a stylistic ideal. Though he never writes without some solid germ of thought, he loves to play with phrases, producing an effect of unreality, and seeming emulous of casuistical adroitness.[40]

The foregoing analysis was necessary because Petrarch became, as it were, a model for his followers in the field of scholarship. Italian humanism never lost the powerful impress of his genius, and the value of his influence can only be appreciated when the time arrives for summing up the total achievement of the Revival.[41] It remains to be regretted that the weaknesses of his character, his personal pretension and literary idealism, were more easily imitated than his strength. Petrarch's egotism differed widely from the insolent conceit of Filelfo and the pedantic boasts of Alciato. Nor did his enthusiasm for antiquity degenerate, like theirs, into a mere uncritical and servile worship. His humanism was both loftier and larger. He never forgot that Christianity was an advance upon Paganism, and that the accomplished man of letters must acquire the culture of the ancients without losing the virtues or sacrificing the hopes of a Christian. If only the humanists of the Renaissance could have preserved this point of view intact, they would have avoided the worst evils of the age, and have secured a nobler liberation of the modern reason. Petrarch created for himself a creed compounded of Roman Stoicism and Christian doctrine, adapting the precepts of the Gospels and the teaching of the Fathers, together with the ethics of Cicero and Seneca, to his own needs. Herein he showed the freedom of his genius, and led the way for the most brilliant thinkers of the coming centuries. The fault of his successors was a tendency to recede from this high vantage-ground, to accept the customary creed with cynical facility, while they inclined in secret to a laxity adopted from their study of the classics. By separating himself from tradition, without displaying an arrogant spirit of revolt against authority, Petrarch established the principle that men must guide their own souls by the double lights of culture and of conscience. His followers were too ready to make culture all in all, and lost thereby the opportunity of grounding a rational philosophy of life upon a solid basis for the modern world. Petrarch made it his sincere aim to be both morally and intellectually his highest self; and if he often failed in practice-if he succumbed to carnal frailty while he praised sobriety-if he sought for notoriety while professing indifference to fame-if he mistook dreams for realities and words for facts-still the ideal he proposed to himself and eloquently preached to his contemporaries, was a new and lofty one. After the lapse of five centuries, few as yet have passed beyond it. Even Goethe, for example, can claim no superiority of humanism above Petrarch, except by right of his participation in the scientific spirit.

We are therefore justified in hailing Petrarch as the Columbus of a new spiritual hemisphere, the discoverer of modern culture. That he knew no Greek, that his Latin verse was lifeless and his prose style far from pure, that his contributions to history and ethics have been superseded, and that his epistles are now only read by antiquaries, cannot impair his claim to this title. From him the inspiration needed to quicken curiosity and stimulate a zeal for knowledge proceeded. But for his intervention in the fourteenth century, it is possible that the Revival of Learning, and all that it implies, might have been delayed until too late. Petrarch died in 1374. The Greek Empire was destroyed in 1453. Between those dates Italy recovered the Greek classics; but whether the Italians would have undertaken this labour if no Petrarch had preached the attractiveness of liberal studies, or if no school of disciples had been formed by him in Florence, remains more than doubtful. We are brought thus to recognise in him one of those heroes concerning whose relation to the spirit of the ages Hegel has discoursed in his 'Philosophy of History.' Petrarch, by anticipating the tendencies of the Revival, created the intellectual milieu required for its evolution.[42] Yet we are not therefore justified in saying that he was not himself the product of already existing spiritual forces in his century. The vast influence he immediately exercised, while Dante, though gifted with a far more powerful individuality, remained comparatively inoperative, proves that the age was specially prepared to receive his inspiration.

What remains to be said about the first period of Italian humanism is almost wholly concerned with men who either immediately or indirectly felt the influence of Petrarch's genius.[43] His shadow stretches over the whole age. Incited by his brilliant renown, Boccaccio, while still a young man, began to read the classical authors, bemoaning the years he had wasted in commerce and the study of the law to please his father. From what the poet of the 'Decameron' has himself told us about the origin of his literary enthusiasm, it appears that Petrarch's example was decisive in determining his course. There is, however, another tale, reported by his fellow-citizen Villani, so characteristic of the age that to omit it in this place would be to sacrifice one of the most attractive legends in the history of literature.[44] 'After wandering through many lands, now here, now there, for a long space of time, when he had reached at last his twenty-eighth year, Boccaccio, at his father's bidding, took up his abode at Naples in the Pergola. There it chanced one day that he walked forth alone for pleasure, and came to the place where Virgil's dust lies buried. At the sight of this sepulchre, he fell into long musing admiration of the man whose bones it covered, brooding with meditative soul upon the poet's fame, until his thoughts found vent in lamentations over his own envious fortunes, whereby he was compelled against his will to give himself to things of commerce that he loathed. A sudden love of the Pierian Muses smote his heart, and turning homeward, he abandoned trade, devoting himself with fervent study to poetry; wherein very shortly, aided alike by his noble genius and his burning desire, he made marvellous progress. This when his father noted, and perceived the heavenly inspiration was more powerful within his son than the paternal will, he at last consented to his studies, and helped him as best he could, although at first he tried to make him turn his talents to the canon law.'

The hero-worship of Boccaccio, not only for the august Virgil, but also for Dante, the master of his youth and the idol of his mature age, is the most amiable trait in a character which, by its geniality and sweetness, cannot fail to win affection.[45] When circumstances brought him into personal relations with Petrarch, he transferred the whole homage of his ardent soul to the only man alive who seemed to him a fit inheritor of ancient fame.[46] Petrarch became the director of his conscience, the master of his studies, the moulder of his thoughts upon the weightiest matters of literary philosophy. The friendship established between the poet of Vaucluse and the lover of Fiammetta lasted through more than twenty years, and was only broken by the death of the former. Throughout this long space of time Boccaccio retained the attitude of a humble scholar, while in his published works, the 'Genealogia Deorum' and the 'Comento sopra i Primi Sedici Capitoli dell' "Inferno" di Dante,' he uniformly spoke of Petrarch as his father and his teacher, the wonder of the century, a heavenly poet better fitted to be numbered with the giants of the past than with the pygmies of a barren age. The fame enjoyed by Petrarch, the honours showered upon him by kings and princes, his own vanity, and even the discrepancies between his habits and his theories, produced no bitterness in Boccaccio's more modest nature. It was enough for the pupil to use his talents for the propagation of his master's views; and thus the influence of Petrarch was communicated to Florence, where Boccaccio continued to reside.[47]

In obedience to Petrarch's advice, Boccaccio in middle life applied himself to learning Greek. Petrarch had never acquired a real knowledge of the language, though he received a few lessons at Avignon from Barlaam, a Calabrian, who had settled in Byzantium, and who sought to advance his fortunes in Italy and Greece by alternate acts of apostasy, and afterwards at Venice from Leontius Pilatus.[48] The opportunities of Greek study enjoyed by Boccaccio were also very meagre, and his mastery of the idiom was superficial. Yet he advanced considerably beyond the point reached by any of his predecessors, so that he deserves to be named as the first Grecian of the modern world. Leontius Pilatus, a Southern Italian and a pupil of Barlaam, who, like his teacher, had removed to Byzantium and renounced the Latin faith, arrived at Venice on his way to Avignon in 1360. Boccaccio induced him to visit Florence, received him into his own house, and caused him to be appointed Greek Professor in the University. Then he set himself to work in earnest on the text of Homer. The ignorance of the teacher was, however, scarcely less than that of his pupil. While Leontius possessed a fair knowledge of Byzantine Greek, his command of Latin was very limited, and his natural stupidity was only equalled by his impudent pretensions. Of classical usages he seems to have known nothing. The imbecility of his master could scarcely have escaped the notice of Boccaccio. Indeed, both he and Petrarch have described Leontius as a sordid cynic with a filthy beard and tangled hair, morose in his temper and disgusting in his personal habits, who concealed a bovine ignorance beneath a lion's hide of ostentation. It was, however, necessary to make the best of him; for Greek in Northern Italy could nowhere else be gained, and Boccaccio had not thought, it seems, of journeying to Byzantium in search of what he wanted.[49] Boccaccio, accordingly, drank the muddy stream of pseudo-learning and lies that flowed from this man's lips, with insatiable avidity. The nonsense administered to him by way of satisfying his thirst for knowledge may best be understood from the following etymologies. ?χιλλε?? was derived from ? and χιλ??, 'without fodder.'[50] The names of the Muses gave rise to these extraordinary explanations:[51]-Melpomene is derived from Melempio comene, which signifies facente stare la meditazione; Thalia is the same as Tithonlia or pognente cosa che germini; Polyhymnia, through Polium neemen, is the same as cosa che faccia molta memoria; Erato becomes Euruncomenon or trovatore del simile, and Terpsichore is described as dilettante ammaestramento.

Such was the bathos reached by erudition in Byzantium. Yet Boccaccio made what use he could of his contemptible materials. At the dictation of Leontius he wrote out the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' in Latin; and this was the first translation made of Homer for modern readers. The manuscript, despatched to Petrarch, was, as we have seen already, greeted with enthusiasm.[52] This moment in the history of scholarship is so memorable that I may be excused for borrowing Baldelli's extract from an ancient copy of Boccaccio's autograph.[53] Lycaon addresses his last prayer to Achilles:-

Genu deprecor te Achilles: tu autem venerare et me miserere.

Vada Servus. Jove genite venerabilis.

Penes enim te primo gustavi Cereris farinam,

Die illo, quando me cepisti in bene facto viridario;

Et me transtulisti procul ferens patreque amicisque

Lemnon ad gloriosam. Hecatombium autem honorem inveni,

Nunc autem l?sus ter tot ferens. Dies autem mihi est

H?c duodecima, quando ad Ilion veni

Multa passus. Nunc iterum me in tuis manibus posuit

Fatum destructibile. Debeo odio esse Jovi patri,

Qui me tibi iterum dedit, medio cuique, me mater

Genuit Lathoi, filia Altai senis.

Only by keeping firmly in mind that such men as Petrarch and Boccaccio, the two chief masters of Italian literature, prized this wretched stuff as an inestimable treasure, can we justly conceive how utterly Greek had been lost, and what an effort it required to restore it to the modern world.

Indefatigable industry was Boccaccio's great merit as a student. He transcribed the whole of Terence with his own hands, and showed a real sense of the advantage to be gained by a critical comparison of texts. In his mythological, geographical, and historical collections he bequeathed to posterity a curious mass of miscellaneous knowledge, forming, as it were, the first dictionaries of biography and antiquity for modern scholars.[54] Far from sharing the originality of Petrarch's humanistic ideal, he remained at best a laborious chronicler of facts and anecdotes. The author of the 'Decameron,' so richly gifted with humour, pathos, and poetic fancy, when he wrapped his student's robe around him, became a painstaking pioneer of antiquarian research.

One very important part of Petrarch's programme was eloquently supported by Boccaccio. The fourteenth and fifteenth books of the 'Genealogia Deorum' form what may be termed the first defence of poesy, composed in honour of his own art by a poet of the modern world. In them Boccaccio expounds a theory already sketched in outline by Petrarch. We have seen that the worst obstacle to humanistic culture lay, not so much in ignorance, as in misconceptions based upon prejudice and scruple. The notion of fine literature as an elevating and purifying influence had been lost. To restore it was the object of these earliest humanists. By poetry, contends Boccaccio, we must understand whatever of weighty in argument, deep in doctrine, and vivid in imagination the man of genius may produce with conscious art in prose and verse. Poetry is instruction conveyed through allegory and fiction. Theology itself, he reasons, is a form of poetry; even the Holy Ghost may be called a Poet, inasmuch as He used the vehicle of symbol in the visions of the prophets and the Revelation of S. John.[55] To such strained arguments was the apostle of culture driven in order to persuade his hearers, and to drag literature from the Avernus of medi?val neglect. We must not, however, imagine that Boccaccio was himself superior to a point of view so puerile. Allegory appeared to him a necessary condition of art: only a madman could deny the hidden meaning of the 'Georgics' and the '?neid;'[56] while the verses of Dante and of Petrarch owed their value to the Christian mysteries they shrouded. The poet, according to this medi?val philosophy of literature, was a sage and teacher wrapping up his august meanings in delightful fictions.[57] Though the common herd despised him as a liar and a falsehood-fabricator, he was, in truth, a prophet uttering his dark speech in parables. How foolish, therefore, reasons the apologist, are the enemies of poetry-sophistical dialecticians and avaricious jurists, who have never trodden the Ph?bean hill, and who scorn the springs of Helicon because they do not flow with gold! Far worse is the condition of those monks and hypocrites who accuse the divine art of immorality and grossness, instead of reading between the lines and seeking the sense conveyed to the understanding under veils of allegory. Truly, proceeds Boccaccio, we do well to shun the errors of Pagans; nor can it be denied that poets of antiquity have written verse abhorrent to the Christian spirit. But, Jesus Christ be praised, the faith has triumphed. Strong in the doctrines of the Gospel and the Church, the student may safely approach the masterpieces of classic literature without fearing the seductions of the Siren.

This argument, forming the gist of the 'Apology for Poetry' in the 'Genealogia Deorum,' is repeated in the 'Comment upon Dante.' It is doubly interesting, both as showing the popular opinion of poetry and the prejudices Boccaccio thought it needful to attack, and also as containing a full exposition of the allegorising theories with which humanism started. For some time after Boccaccio's death the paragraphs condensed above supplied the champions of culture with weapons to be used against their ecclesiastical and scholastic antagonists; nor was it until humanism had triumphed, that the allegorical interpretation of the ancients was finally abandoned.

Independently of his contributions to learning, Boccaccio occupies a prominent place in the history of the Revival through the new spirit he introduced into the vulgar literature. He was the first who frankly sought to justify the pleasures of the carnal life, whose temperament, unburdened by asceticism, found a congenial element in amorous legends of antiquity. The romances of Boccaccio, with their beautiful gardens and sunny skies, fair women and luxurious lovers, formed a transition from the chivalry of the early Italian poets to the sensuality of Beccadelli and Pontano. He prepared the nation for literary and artistic Paganism by unconsciously divesting thought and feeling of their spiritual elevation. Dante had made the whole world one in Christ. Petrarch put humanity to school in the lecture-room of Roman sages and in the councils of the Church. A terrestrial paradise of sensual delight, where all things were desirable and delicate, contented the poet of the 'Fiammetta' and 'Filostrato.' To the beatific vision of the 'Divine Comedy,' to the 'Trionfo della Morte,' succeeded the 'Visione Amorosa'-a review of human life, in which Boccaccio begins by invoking Dame Venus and ends with earthly love, Il Sior di tutta pace.

The name given to Boccaccio by contemporaries, Giovanni della Tranquillità, sufficiently indicates his peaceful temperament. He was, in fact, the scholar, working in his study, and contributing to the erudition of his age by writings. Another of Petrarch's disciples, Giovanni Malpaghino, called from his birthplace Giovanni da Ravenna, exercised a more active personal influence over the destinies of scholarship. While still a youth he had been employed by Petrarch as secretary and amanuensis. His general ability, clear handwriting, and enthusiasm for learning first recommended him to the poet, who made use of him for copying manuscripts and arranging his familiar letters. In the course of this work John of Ravenna became himself a learned man, acquiring a finer sense of Latinity than was possessed by any other scholar of his time. Something, too, of the sacred fire he caught from Petrarch, so that in his manhood the very faults of his nature became instrumental in diffusing throughout Italy the passion for antiquity. He could not long content himself with being even Petrarch's scribe. Irresistible restlessness impelled him to seek adventures in the outer world, to mix with men and gain the glory he was always reading of. Petrarch, incapable of comprehending that any honour was greater than that of being his satellite, treated this ambitious pupil like a wilful child. A quarrel ensued. Giovanni left his benefactor's house and went forth to try his fortunes. Without repeating the vicissitudes of his career in detail, it is enough to mention that want and misery soon drove him back to Petrarch; that once more the vagrant impulse came upon him, and that for a season he filled the post of chancellor in the little principality of Carrara.[58] The one thing, however, which he could not endure, was the routine of fixed employment. Therefore we find that he abandoned the Court of the Malaspini, and betook himself to the more congenial work of a wandering professor. His prodigious memory, by enabling him to retain, word for word, the text of authors he had read, proved of invaluable service to him in this career. His passionate poetic temper made him apt to raise enthusiasm in young souls for literary studies. Giovanni da Ravenna was in fact the first of those vagabond humanists with whom we shall be occupied in the next chapters, and of whom Filelfo was the most illustrious example. Florence, Padua, Venice, and many other cities of Italy received the Latinist, whose reputation now increased with every year. In each of these towns in succession he lectured upon Cicero and the Roman poets, pouring forth the knowledge he had acquired in Petrarch's study, and transmitting to his audience the inspiration he had received from his master. The school thus formed was compared a century later to the Trojan horse, whence issued a band of heroes destined to possess the capital of classic learning. As a writer, he produced little that is worth more than a passing notice. His real merit consisted, as Lionardo Bruni witnessed, in his faculty of arousing a passion for pure literature, and especially for the study of Cicero. Among his most illustrious pupils may be mentioned Francesco Barbaro, Palla degli Strozzi, Roberto de' Rossi, Francesco Filelfo, Carlo Marsuppini, Poggio Bracciolini, Lionardo Bruni, Guarino da Verona, Vittorino da Feltre, Ambrogio Traversari, Ognibene da Vicenza, and Pier Paolo Vergerio. This list, as will appear from the sequel of my work, includes nearly all those scholars who devoted their energies to erudition at Venice, Florence, Rome, Mantua, Ferrara, and Perugia in the fifteenth century. Giovanni da Ravenna deserves, therefore, to be honoured as the link between the age of Petrarch and the age of Poggio, as the vessel chosen for communicating the sacred fire of humanism to the Courts and Republics of Italy. None but a wanderer, vagus quidam, as Petrarch, half in scorn and half in sorrow, called his protégé, could so effectually have carried on the work of propagation.[59]

The name of the next student claiming our attention as a disciple of Petrarch, brings us once more back to Florence. Luigi Marsigli was a monk of the Augustine Order of S. Spirito. Petrarch, noticing his distinguished abilities, had exhorted him to make a special study of theology, and to enter the lists as a champion of Christianity against the Averrhoists.[60] Under the name of Averrhoists in the fourteenth century were ranged all freethinkers who questioned the fundamental doctrines of the Church, doubted the immortality of the soul, and employed their ingenuity in a dialectic at least as trivial as that of the schoolmen, but directed to a very different end.[61] Petrarch disliked their want of liberal culture as much as he abhorred their affectation of impiety. The stupid materialism they professed, their gross flippancy, and the idle pretence of natural science upon which they piqued themselves, were regarded by him as so many obstacles to his own ideal of humanism. He only saw in them another set of scholastic wranglers, worse than the theologians, inasmuch as they had cast off Christ. Against Averrhoes, 'the raging hound who barked at all things sacred and Divine,' Petrarch therefore sought to stimulate the young Marsigli. Marsigli, however, while he shared Petrarch's respect for humane culture, seems to have sympathised with the audacity and freedom of his proposed antagonists. The Convent of S. Spirito became under his influence the centre of a learned society, who met there regularly for disputations. The theme chosen for discussion was posted up upon the wall of the debating-room, metaphysical and ethical subjects forming the most frequent matter of inquiry.[62] Among the members of the circle who sharpened their wits in this species of dialectic, we find Coluccio de' Salutati, Roberto de' Rossi, Niccolo de' Niccoli, and Giannozzo Manetti. The influence of Marsigli in forming their character was undoubtedly powerful. Poggio, in his funeral oration upon Niccolo de' Niccoli, tells us that 'the house of Marsigli was frequented by distinguished youths, who set themselves to imitate his life and habits; it was, moreover, the resort of the best and noblest burghers of this city, who flowed together from all quarters to him as to some oracle of more than human wisdom.'[63] His intellectual acuteness, solid erudition, and winning eloquence were displayed in moral disquisitions upon Virgil, Cicero, and Seneca. In this way he had the merit of combining the dialectic method and the bold spirit of the Averrhoists with the sound learning and polite culture of the newly-discovered humanities. The Convent of S. Spirito has to be mentioned as the first of those many private academies to which the free thought and the scholarship of Italy were afterwards destined to owe so much.

It is my object in this chapter to show how humanistic scholarship, starting from Petrarch, penetrated every department of study, and began to permeate the intellectual life of the Italians. We have now to notice its intrusion into the sphere of politics. Petrarch died in 1374, Boccaccio in 1375. The latter date is also that of Coluccio de' Salutati's entrance upon the duties of Florentine Chancellor. Salutato, the friend of Boccaccio and the disciple of Marsigli, the professed worshipper of Petrarch and the translator of Dante into Latin verse, was destined to exercise an important influence in his own department as a stylist. Before he was called to act as secretary to the Signory of Florence in his forty-sixth year, he had already acquired the learning and imbibed the spirit of his age. He was known as a diligent collector of manuscripts and promoter of Greek studies, as a writer on mythology and morals, as an orator and miscellaneous author.[64] His talents had now to be concentrated on the weightier business of the Florentine Republic; but his study of antiquity caused him to conceive his duties and the political relations of the State he served, in a new light. During the wars carried on with Gregory XI. and the Visconti, his pen was never idle. For the first time he introduced into public documents the gravity of style and melody of phrase he had learned in the school of classic rhetoricians. The effect produced by this literary statesman, as elegant in authorship as he was subtle in the conduct of affairs, can only be estimated at its proper value when we remember that the Italians were now ripe to receive the influence of rhetoric, and only too ready to attribute weight to verbal ingenuity. Gian Galeazzo Visconti is said to have declared that Salutato had done him more harm by his style than a troop of paid mercenaries.[65] The epistles, despatches, protocols, and manifestoes composed by their Chancellor for the Florentine priors, were distributed throughout Italy. Read and copied by the secretaries of other states, they formed the models of a new State eloquence.[66] Elegant Latinity became a necessary condition of public documents, and Ciceronian phrases were henceforth reckoned among the indispensable engines of a diplomatic armoury. Offices of trust in the Papal Curia, the courts of the Despots, and the chanceries of the republics were thus thrown open to professional humanists. In the next age we shall find that neither princes, popes, nor priors could do without the services of trained stylists.

While concentrating attention upon this chief contribution of Salutato to Italian scholarship, I must not omit to notice, however briefly, the patronage he exercised at Florence. Both Poggio Bracciolini and Lionardo Bruni owed their advancement to his interest.[67] Giacomo da Scarparia, the first Florentine who visited Byzantium with a view to learning Greek, received from him the warmest encouragement, together with a commission for the purchase of manuscripts. To his activity in concert with Palla degli Strozzi was due the establishment of a Greek chair in the University of Florence. Nor was this zeal confined to the living. He composed the Lives of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, translated a portion of the 'Divine Comedy' into Latin for its wider circulation through the learned world, and caused the 'Africa' of Petrarch to be published.[68] When the illustrious Chancellor died, in the year 1406, at the age of seventy-six, he was honoured with a public funeral; the poet's crown was placed upon his brow, a panegyrical oration was recited, and a monument was erected to him in the Duomo.[69]

What Salutato accomplished for the style of public documents, Gasparino da Barzizza effected for familiar correspondence. After teaching during several years at Venice and Padua, he was summoned to Milan in 1418 by Filippo Maria Visconti, who ordered him to open a school in that capital. Gasparino made a special study of Cicero's Letters, and caused his pupils to imitate them as closely as possible, forming in this way an art of fluent letter-writing known afterwards as the ars familiariter scribendi. Epistolography in general, considered as a branch of elegant literature, occupied all the scholars of the Renaissance, and had the advantage of establishing a link of union between learned men in different parts of Italy. We therefore recognise in Gasparino the initiator, after Petrarch, of a highly important branch of Italian culture. This, when it reached maturity, culminated in the affectations of the Ciceronian purists. It must be understood that neither Salutato nor Gasparino attained to real polish or freedom of style. Compared even with the Latinity of Poggio, theirs is heavy and uncouth; while that of Poggio seems barbarous by the side of Poliziano's, and Poliziano in turn yields the palm of mere correctness to Bembo. It was only by degrees that the taste of the Italians formed itself, and that facility was acquired in writing a lost language. The fact that medi?val Latin was still used in legal documents, in conversation, in the offices of the Church, and in the theological works which formed the staple of all libraries, impeded the recovery of a classic style. When the Italians had finally learned how to polish prose, it was easy to hand on the art to other nations; while to sneer at their pedantry, as Erasmus did, was no matter of great difficulty. By that time their scrupulous and anxious preoccupation with purity of phrase threatened danger to the interests of liberal learning.

Hitherto, with the exception only of Boccaccio's Greek studies, I have had to trace the rise of Latin letters and to call particular attention to the cult of Cicero in Italy. It is now necessary to mention the advent of a man who played a part in the revival of learning only second to that of Petrarch. Manuel Chrysoloras, a Byzantine of noble birth, came to Italy during the Pontificate of Boniface IX., charged by the Emperor Pal?ologus with the mission of attempting to arm the states of Christendom against the Turk. Like all the Greeks who visited Western Europe, Chrysoloras first alighted in Venice; but the Republic of the Lagoons neither understood the secret nor felt the need of retaining these birds of passage. After a few months they almost invariably passed on to Florence-the real centre of the intellectual life of Italy. As soon as it was known that Chrysoloras, who enjoyed the fame of being the most accomplished and eloquent Hellenist of his age, had arrived with his companion, Demetrios Kydonios, in Venice, two noble Florentines, Roberto de' Rossi and Giacomo d'Angelo da Scarparia, set forth to visit him. The residence of the Greek ambassadors in Italy on this occasion was but brief; they found that, politically, they could effect nothing. But Giacomo da Scarparia journeyed in their society to Byzantium; while Roberto de' Rossi returned to Florence, full of the impression which the erudite philosophers had left upon him. The report he made to his fellow-citizens awoke a passionate desire in Palla degli Strozzi and Niccolo de' Niccoli to bring Chrysoloras in person to Florence. Their urgent appeals to the Signory resulted in an invitation whereby Chrysoloras in 1396 was induced to fill the Greek chair in the university. A yearly stipend of 150 golden florins, raised afterwards to 250, was voted for his maintenance. This engagement secured the future of Greek erudition in Europe. The merit of having brought the affair to a successful issue belongs principally to Palla degli Strozzi, of whom Vespasiano wrote: 'There being in Florence exceeding good knowledge of Latin letters, but of Greek none, he resolved that this defect should be remedied, and therefore did all he could to make Manuel Grisolora visit Italy, using all his influence thereto and paying a large portion of the expense incurred.'[70] We must not, however, omit the share which Coluccio Salutato,[71] by his influence with the Signory, and Niccolo de' Niccoli, by the interest he exerted with the Uffiziali dello Studio, may also claim. Among the audience of this the first true teacher of Greek at Florence were numbered Palla degli Strozzi, Roberto de' Rossi, Poggio Bracciolini, Lionardo Bruni, Francesco Barbaro, Giannozzo Manetti, Carlo Marsuppini, and Ambrogio Traversari-some of them young men of eighteen, others old and grey-haired, nearly all of them the scholars in Latinity of Giovanni da Ravenna. Nor was Florence the only town to receive the learning of Chrysoloras. He opened schools at Rome, at Padua, at Milan, and at Venice; so that his influence as a wandering professor was at least equal to that exercised by Giovanni da Ravenna.

The impulse communicated to the study of antiquity by Chrysoloras, and the noble enthusiasm of his scholars for pure literature, may best be understood from a passage in the 'Commentaries' of Lionardo Bruni, whereof the following is a compressed translation:[72]-'Letters at this period grew mightily in Italy, seeing that the knowledge of Greek, intermitted for seven centuries, revived. Chrysoloras of Byzantium, a man of noble birth and well skilled in Greek literature, brought to us Greek learning. I at that time was following the civil law, though not ill-versed in other studies; for by nature I loved learning with ardour, nor had I given slight pains to dialectic and to rhetoric. Therefore, at the coming of Chrysoloras, I was made to halt in my choice of lives, seeing that I held it wrong to desert law, and yet I reckoned it a crime to omit so great an occasion of learning the Greek literature; and oftentimes I reasoned with myself after this manner:-Can it be that thou, when thou mayest gaze on Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes, together with other poets, philosophers, and orators, concerning whom so great and so wonderful things are said, and mayest converse with them, and receive their admirable doctrine-can it be that thou wilt desert thyself and neglect the opportunity divinely offered thee? Through seven hundred years no one in all Italy has been master of Greek letters; and yet we acknowledge that all science is derived from them. Of civil law, indeed, there are in every city scores of doctors; but should this single and unique teacher of Greek be removed, thou wilt find no one to instruct thee. Conquered at last by these reasonings, I delivered myself over to Chrysoloras with such passion that what I had received from him by day in hours of waking, occupied my mind at night in hours of sleep.'

The earnestness of this paragraph is characteristic of the whole period. The scholars who assembled in the lecture-rooms of Chrysoloras, felt that the Greek texts, whereof he alone supplied the key, contained those elements of spiritual freedom and intellectual culture without which the civilisation of the modern world would be impossible. Nor were they mistaken in what was then a guess rather than a certainty. The study of Greek implied the birth of criticism, comparison, research. Systems based on ignorance and superstition were destined to give way before it. The study of Greek opened philosophical horizons far beyond the dream-world of the churchmen and the monks; it stimulated the germs of science, suggested new astronomical hypotheses, and indirectly led to the discovery of America. The study of Greek resuscitated a sense of the beautiful in art and literature. It subjected the creeds of Christianity, the language of the Gospels, the doctrine of S. Paul, to analysis, and commenced a new era for Biblical inquiry. If it be true, as a writer no less sober in his philosophy than eloquent in his language has lately asserted, that, 'except the blind forces of nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin,' we are justified in regarding the point of contact between the Greek teacher Chrysoloras and his Florentine pupils as one of the most momentous crises in the history of civilisation. Indirectly, the Italian intellect had hitherto felt Hellenic influence through Latin literature. It was now about to receive that influence immediately from actual study of the masterpieces of the Attic authors. The world was no longer to be kept in ignorance of those 'eternal consolations' of the human race. No longer could the scribe omit Greek quotations from his Latin text with the dogged snarl of obtuse self-satisfaction-Gr?ca sunt, ergo non legenda. The motto had rather to be changed into a cry of warning for ecclesiastical authority upon the verge of dissolution-Gr?ca sunt, ergo periculosa: since the reawakening faith in human reason, the reawakening belief in the dignity of man, the desire for beauty, the liberty, audacity, and passion of the Renaissance, received from Greek studies their strongest and most vital impulse.

* * *

Condition of the Universities in Italy-Bologna-High Schools founded from it-Naples under Frederick II.

-Under the House of Anjou-Ferrara-Piacenza-Perugia-Rome-Pisa-Florence-Imperial and Papal Charters-Foreign Students-Professorial Staff-Subjects taught in the High Schools-Place assigned to Humanism-Pay of the Professors of Eloquence-Francesco Filelfo-The Humanists less powerful at the Universities-Method of Humanistic Teaching-The Book Market before Printing-Medi?val Libraries-Cost of Manuscripts-Stationarii and Peciarii-Negligence of Copyists-Discovery of Classical Codices-Boccaccio at Monte Cassino-Poggio at Constance-Convent of S. Gallen-Bruni's Letter to Poggio-Manuscripts discovered by Poggio-Nicholas of Treves-Collection of Greek Manuscripts-Aurispa, Filelfo, and Guarino-The Ruins of Rome-Their Influence on Humanism-Dante and Villani-Rienzi-His Idealistic Patriotism-Vanity-Political Incompetence-Petrarch's Relations with Rienzi-Injury to Monuments in Rome-Poggio's Roman Topography-Sentimental Feeling for the Ruins of Antiquity-Ciriac of Ancona.

Having so far traced the quickening of a new sense for antiquity among the Italians, it will be well at this point to consider the external resources of Humanism before continuing the history of the Revival in the fifteenth century. The condition of the universities, the state of the book trade before the invention of printing, and the discovery of manuscripts claim separate attention; nor may it be out of place to inquire what stimulus the enthusiasm for classical studies received from the ruins of Rome. A review of these topics will help to explain the circumstances under which the pioneers of culture had to labour, and the nature of the crusade they instituted against ignorance in every part of Europe.

The oldest and most frequented university in Italy, that of Bologna, is represented as having flourished in the twelfth century.[73] Its prosperity in early times depended greatly on the personal conduct of the principal professors, who, when they were not satisfied with their entertainment, were in the habit of seceding with their pupils to other cities. Thus high schools were opened from time to time in Modena, Reggio, and elsewhere by teachers who broke the oaths that bound them to reside in Bologna, and fixed their centre of education in a rival town. To make such temporary changes was not difficult in an age when what we have to call an university, consisted of masters and scholars, without college buildings, without libraries, without endowments, and without scientific apparatus. The technical name for such institutions seems to have been studium scholarium, Italianised into studio or studio pubblico.[74] Among the more permanent results of these secessions may be mentioned the establishment of the high school at Vicenza by translation from Bologna in 1204, and the opening of a school at Arezzo under similar circumstances in 1215; the great University of Padua first saw the light in consequence of political discords forcing the professors to quit Bologna for a season.[75]

The first half of the thirteenth century witnessed the foundation of these studi in considerable numbers. That of Vercelli was opened in 1228, the municipality providing two certified copyists for the convenience of students who might wish to purchase text-books.[76] In 1224 the Emperor Frederick II., to whom the south of Italy owed a precocious eminence in literature, established the University of Naples by an Imperial diploma.[77] With a view to rendering it the chief seat of learning in his dominions, he forbade the subjects of the Regno to frequent other schools, and suppressed the University of Bologna by letters general. Thereupon Bologna joined the Lombard League, defied the emperor, and refused to close the schools, which numbered at that period about ten thousand students of various nationalities. In 1227 Frederick revoked his edict, and Bologna remained thenceforward unmolested. Political and internal vicissitudes, affecting all the Italian universities at this period, interrupted the prosperity of that of Naples. In the middle of the thirteenth century Salerno proved a dangerous rival; but when the House of Anjou was established in the kingdom of the Sicilies, special privileges were granted, restoring the high school of the capital to the first rank. Charles I. created a separate court of jurisdiction for its management. This consisted of a judge and three assessors, one for the control of foreigners, another for the subjects of the Regno, and the third for Italians from other states.

In 1264 we find a public school in operation at Ferrara. By its charter the professors were exempt from military service. The University of Piacenza came into existence a little earlier. Innocent IV. established it in 1248, with privileges similar to those of Paris and Bologna. An important group of studi pubblici owed their origin to Papal or Imperial charters in the first half of the fourteenth century. That of Perugia was founded in 1307 by a Bull of Clement V. That of Rome dated from 1303, in which year Boniface VIII. gave it a constitution by a special edict; but the translation of the Papal See to Avignon caused it to fall into premature decadence. The University of Pisa had already existed for some years, when it received a charter in 1343 from Clement VI. That of Florence was first founded in 1321.[78] In 1348 a place for its public buildings was assigned between the Duomo and the Palazzo Pubblico, on the site of what was afterwards known as the Collegium Eugenianum. A council of eight burghers was appointed for its management, and a yearly sum was set apart for its maintenance. In 1349 Clement VI. gave it the same privileges as the University of Bologna, while in 1364 it received an Imperial diploma from Charles IV. The same emperor granted charters to Siena in 1357, to Arezzo in 1356, and to Lucca in 1369. In 1362 Galeazzo Visconti obtained a charter for his University of Pavia from Charles IV., with the privileges of Paris, Oxford, and Bologna.

It will be observed that the majority of the studi pubblici obtained charters either from the Pope or the emperor, or from both, less for the sake of any immediate benefit to be derived from Papal or Imperial patronage, than because supreme authority in Italy was still referred to one or other of these heads. It was a great object with each city to increase its wealth by attracting foreigners as residents, and to retain the native youth within its precincts. The municipalities, therefore, accorded immunities from taxation and military service to bona fide students, prohibited their burghers from seeking rival places of learning, and in some cases allowed the university authorities to exercise a special jurisdiction over the motley multitude of scholars from all countries. How miscellaneous the concourse in some of the high schools used to be, may be gathered from the reports extracted by Tiraboschi from their registers. At Vicenza, for example, in 1209 we find the names of Bohemians, Poles, Frenchmen, Burgundians, Germans, and Spaniards, as well as of Italians of divers towns. The rectors of this studio in 1205 included an Englishman, a Proven?al, a German, and a Cremonese. The list of illustrious students at Bologna between 1265 and 1294 show men of all the European nationalities, proving that the foreigners attracted by the university must have formed no inconsiderable element in the whole population.[79] This will account for the prominent part played by the students from time to time in the political history of Bologna.[80]

The importance attached by great cities to their universities as a source of strength, may be gathered from the chapter in Matteo Villani's Chronicle describing the foundation of the studio pubblico in Florence.[81] He expressly mentions that the Signory were induced to take this step in consequence of the depopulation inflicted by the Black Death of 1348. By drawing residents to Florence from other States, they hoped to increase the number of the inhabitants, and to restore the decayed fame and splendour of the commonwealth.[82] At the same time they thought that serious studies might put an end to the demoralisation produced in all classes by the plague. With this object in view, they engaged the best teachers, and did not hesitate to devote a yearly sum of 2,500 golden florins to the maintenance of their high school. Bologna, which owed even more than Florence to its university, is said to have lavished as much as half of its revenue, about 20,000 ducats, on the pay of professors and other incidental expenses. The actual cost incurred by cities through their schools cannot, however, be accurately estimated, since it varied from year to year according to the engagements made with special teachers. At Pavia, for example, in 1400, the university supported in Canon Law several eminent doctors, in Civil Law thirteen, in Medicine five, in Philosophy three, in Astrology one, in Greek one, and in Eloquence one.[83] Whether this staff was maintained after the lapse of another twenty years we do not know for certain.

The subjects taught in the high schools were Canon and Civil Law, Medicine, and Theology. These faculties, important for the professional education of the public, formed the staple of the academical curriculum. Chairs of Rhetoric, Philosophy, and Astronomy were added according to occasion, the last sometimes including the study of judicial astrology. If we inquire how the humanists or professors of classic literature were related to the universities, we find that, at first at any rate, they always occupied a second rank. The permanent teaching remained in the hands of jurists, who enjoyed life engagements at a high rate of pay, while the Latinists and Grecians could only aspire to the temporary occupation of the Chair of Rhetoric, with salaries considerably lower than those of lawyers or physicians. The cause of this inferiority is easily explained. It was natural that important and remunerative branches of learning like law and medicine should attract a greater number of students than pure literature, and that their professors should be better paid than the teachers of eloquence. Padua, Bologna, and Pavia in particular retained their legal speciality throughout the period of the Renaissance, and remained but little open to humanistic influences. At Padua we find from Sanudo's Diary[84] that an eminent jurist received a stipend of 1,000 ducats. A Doctor of Medicine at the same university, in 1491, received a similar stipend, together with the right of private practice. At Bologna the famous jurist Abbas Siculus (Niccolo de' Tudeschi) drew 800 scudi yearly; at Padua Giovanni da Imola in 1406, and Paolo da Castro in 1430, drew a sum of 600 ducats.[85] About the same time (1453) Lauro Quirino, who professed rhetoric at Padua, was paid at the rate of only forty ducats yearly, while Lorenzo Valla, at Pavia, filled the Chair of Eloquence with an annual stipend of fifty sequins. The disparity between the remuneration of jurists and that of humanists was not so great at all the universities. Florence in especial formed a notable exception. From the date of its commencement the Florentine studio was partial to literature; and it is worth remarking that when Lorenzo de' Medici transferred the high school to Pisa, he retained at Florence the professors of the liberal sciences and belles-lettres. The great reputation of eminent rhetoricians, again, often secured for them temporary engagements at a high rate. Thus we gather from Rosmini's 'Life of Filelfo' that this humanist received from Venice the offer of 500 sequins yearly as remuneration for his professorial services. Bologna proposed an annual stipend of 450 sequins when he undertook to lecture upon eloquence and moral philosophy. At Florence his income amounted to 350 golden florins, secured for three years, and subsequently raised to 450. With Siena he stipulated for 350 golden florins for two years. At Milan his Chair of Eloquence was endowed with 500 golden florins, and this salary was afterwards increased to 700. Nicholas V. offered him an annual income of 600 ducats if he would devote himself to the translation of Greek books into Latin, while Sixtus IV. tried to bring him to Rome by proposing 600 Roman florins as the stipend of the Chair of Rhetoric.

The fact, however, remains that while the special study of antiquity preoccupied the minds of the Italians, and attracted all the finer intellects among the youth ambitious of distinction, its professors never succeeded in taking complete possession of the universities. Their position there was always that of wandering stars and resident aliens. This accounts in some measure for the bitter hostility and scorn which they displayed against the teachers of theology and law and medicine. The real home of the humanists was in the Courts of princes, the palaces of the cultivated burghers, the Roman Curia, and the chanceries of the republics. As secretaries, house tutors, readers, Court poets, historiographers, public orators, and companions they were indispensable. We shall therefore find that the private academies formed by the literati and their patrons, the schools of princes established at Mantua and Ferrara, and the residences of great nobles play a more important part in the history of humanism than do the universities. At the same time the spirit of the new culture diffused by the humanists so thoroughly permeated the whole intellectual activity of the Italians, that in course of time the special studies of the high schools assumed a more literary and liberal form. The classics then supplied the starting-point for juristic and medical disquisitions. Poliziano was seen lecturing upon the Pandects of Justinian, while Pomponazzi made the Chair of Philosophy at Padua subservient to the exposition of materialism. This triumph of humanism, like its triumph in the Church, was effected less by immediate working on the universities than by a gradual and indirect determination of the whole race towards the study of antiquity.

In picturing to ourselves the method pursued by the humanists in the instruction of their classes, we must divest our minds of all associations with the practice of modern professors. Very few of the students whom the master saw before him, possessed more than meagre portions of the text of Virgil or of Cicero; they had no notes, grammars, lexicons, or dictionaries of antiquities and mythology, to help them. It was therefore necessary for the lecturer to dictate quotations, to repeat parallel passages at full length, to explain geographical and historical allusions, to analyse the structure of sentences in detail, to provide copious illustrations of grammatical usage, to trace the stages by which a word acquired its meaning in a special context, to command a full vocabulary of synonyms, to give rules for orthography, and to have the whole Pantheon at his fingers' ends. In addition to this he was expected to comment upon the meaning of his author, to interpret his philosophy, to point out the beauties of his style, to introduce appropriate moral disquisition on his doctrine, to sketch his biography, and to give some account of his relation to the history of his country and to his predecessors in the field of letters. In short, the professor of rhetoric had to be a grammarian, a philologer, an historian, a stylist, and a sage in one. He was obliged to pretend at least to an encyclop?dic knowledge of the classics, and to retain whole volumes in his memory. All these requirements, which seem to have been satisfied by such men as Filelfo and Poliziano, made the profession of eloquence-for so the varied subject matter of humanism was often called-a very different business from that which occupies a lecturer of the present century. Scores of students, old and young, with nothing but pen and paper on the desks before them, sat patiently recording what the lecturer said. At the end of his discourses on the 'Georgics' or the 'Verrines,' each of them carried away a compendious volume, containing a transcript of the author's text, together with a miscellaneous mass of notes, critical, explanatory, ethical, ?sthetical, historical, and biographical. In other words, a book had been dictated, and as many scores of copies as there were attentive pupils had been made.[86] The language used was Latin. No dialect of Italian could have been intelligible to the students of different nationalities who crowded the lecture-rooms. The elementary education in grammar requisite for following a professorial course of lectures had been previously provided by the teachers of the Latin schools, which depended for maintenance partly on the State[87] and partly on private enterprise. The Church does not seem to have undertaken the management of these primary boys' schools.

Since this was the nature of academical instruction in the humanities before the age of printing, it followed that the professor had a direct interest in frequently shifting his scene of operations. More than a certain number of such books as I have just attempted to describe could not be carried in his head. After he had dictated his work on the 'Georgics' at Florence, he was naturally anxious to move to Milan and to do the same. A new audience gave new value to his lectures, and another edition, as it were, of his book was put in circulation. In the correspondence which passed between professors and the rectors of the high schools previously to an engagement, we sometimes find that the former undertake to explain particular authors during their proposed residence. On these authors they had no doubt bestowed the best years of their lives, making them the vehicle for all the miscellaneous learning they possessed, and grounding their fame upon the beauty, clearness, and copiousness of their exposition.[88]

Having described the conditions under which professorial teaching was conducted in the fifteenth century, it is now of some importance to form a notion of the state of the book market and the diffusion of MSS. before the invention of printing. Difficult as it is to speak with accuracy on these topics some facts must be collected, seeing that the high price and comparative rarity of books contributed in a very important degree to determine the character of the instruction provided by the humanists.

Scarcity of books was at first a chief impediment to the study of antiquity. Popes and princes and even great religious institutions possessed far fewer books than many farmers of the present age. The library belonging to the Cathedral Church of S. Martino at Lucca in the ninth century contained only nineteen volumes of abridgments from ecclesiastical commentaries. The Cathedral of Novara in 1212 could boast copies of Boethius, Priscian, the 'Code of Justinian,' the 'Decretals,' and the 'Etymology' of Isidorus, besides a Bible and some devotional treatises.[89] This slender stock passed for great riches. Each of the precious volumes in such a collection was an epitome of medi?val art. Its pages were composed of fine vellum adorned with pictures.[90] The initial letters displayed elaborate flourishes and exquisitely illuminated groups of figures. The scribe took pains to render his caligraphy perfect, and to ornament the margins with crimson, gold, and blue. Then he handed the parchment sheets to the binder, who encased them in rich settings of velvet or carved ivory and wood, embossed with gold and precious stones. The edges were gilt and stamped with patterns. The clasps were of wrought silver, chased with niello. The price of such masterpieces was enormous. Borso d'Este, in 1464, gave eight gold ducats to Gherardo Ghislieri of Bologna for an illuminated Lancellotto, and in 1469 he bought a Josephus and Quintus Curtius for forty ducats.[91] His great Bible in two volumes is said to have cost 1,375 sequins. Rinaldo degli Albizzi notes in his Memoirs that he paid eleven golden florins for a Bible at Arezzo in 1406. Of these MSS. the greater part were manufactured in the cloisters, and it was here too that the martyrdom of ancient authors took place. Lucretius and Livy gave place to chronicles, antiphonaries, and homilies. Parchment was extremely dear, and the scrolls which nobody could read might be scraped and washed. Accordingly, the copyist erased the learning of the ancients, and filled the fair blank space he gained with litanies. At the same time it is but just to the monks to add that palimpsests have occasionally been found in which ecclesiastical works have yielded place to copies of the Latin poets used in elementary education.[92]

Another obstacle to the diffusion of learning was the incompetence of the copyists. It is true that at the great universities stationarii, who supplied the text-books in use to students, were certified and subjected to the control of special censors called peciarii. Yet their number was not large, and when they quitted the routine to which they were accustomed their incapacity betrayed itself by numerous errors.[93] Petrarch's invective against the professional copyists shows the depth to which the art had sunk. 'Who,' he exclaims, 'will discover a cure for the ignorance and vile sloth of these copyists, who spoil everything and turn it to nonsense? If Cicero, Livy, and other illustrious ancients were to return to life, do you think they would understand their own works? There is no check upon these copyists, selected without examination or test of their capacity. Workmen, husbandmen, weavers, artisans, are not indulged in the same liberty.'[94] Coluccio Salutato repeats the same complaint, averring that the copies of Dante and Petrarch no more correspond to the originals than bad statues to the men they pretend to represent. At the same time the copyists formed a necessary and flourishing class of craftsmen. They were well paid. Ambrogio Traversari told his friend Giustiniani in 1430 that he could recommend him a good scribe at the pay of thirty golden florins a year and his keep. Under these circumstances it was usual for even the most eminent scholars, like Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Poggio, to make their own copies of MSS. Niccolo de' Niccoli transcribed nearly the whole of the codices that formed the nucleus of the Library of the Mark. Sometimes they sold them or made advantageous changes. Poggio, for example, sold two volumes of S. Jerome's 'Letters' to Lionello d'Este for 100 golden florins. Beccadelli bought a Livy from him for 120 golden florins, having parted with a farm to defray the expense. It is clear that the first step toward the revival of learning implied three things: first, the collection of MSS. wherever they could be saved from the indolence of the monks; secondly, the formation of libraries for their preservation; and, thirdly, the invention of an art whereby they might be multiplied cheaply, conveniently, and accurately.

The labour involved in the collection of classical manuscripts had to be performed by a few enthusiastic scholars, who received no help from the universities and their academical scribes, and who met with no sympathy in the monasteries they were bent on ransacking. The new culture demanded wholly new machinery; and new runners in the torch-race of civilisation sprang into existence. The high schools were contented with their summaries and glosses. The monks performed at best the work of earthworms, who unwittingly preserve fragments of Greek architecture from corrosion by heaping mounds of mould and rubbish round them. Meanwhile the humanists went forth with the instinct of explorers to release the captives and awake the dead. From the convent libraries of Italy, from the museums of Constantinople, from the abbeys of Germany and Switzerland and France, the slumbering spirits of the ancients had to be evoked. The chivalry of learning, banded together for this service, might be likened to Crusaders. As the Franks deemed themselves thrice blest if they returned with relics from Jerusalem, so these new Knights of the Holy Ghost, seeking not the sepulchre of a risen God, but the tombs wherein the genius of the ancient world awaited resurrection, felt holy transports when a brown, begrimed, and crabbed copy of some Greek or Latin author rewarded their patient quest. Days and nights they spent in carefully transcribing it, comparing their own MS. with the original, multiplying facsimiles, and sending them abroad with free hands to students who in their turn took copies, till the treasure-trove became the common property of all who could appreciate its value. This work of discovery began with Petrarch. I have already alluded to the journeys he undertook in the hope of collecting the lost MSS. of Cicero. It was carried on by Boccaccio. The account given by Benvenuto da Imola of Boccaccio's visit to Monte Cassino brings vividly before us both the ardour of these first explorers and the apathy of the Benedictines (who have sometimes been called the saviours of learning) with regard to the treasures of their own libraries:[95]-'With a view to the clearer understanding of this text ('Paradiso,' xxii. 74), I will relate what my revered teacher, Boccaccio of Certaldo, humorously told me. He said that when he was in Apulia, attracted by the celebrity of the convent, he paid a visit to Monte Cassino, whereof Dante speaks. Desirous of seeing the collection of books, which he understood to be a very choice one, he modestly asked a monk-for he was always most courteous in manners-to open the library, as a favour, for him. The monk answered stiffly, pointing to a steep staircase, "Go up; it is open." Boccaccio went up gladly; but he found that the place which held so great a treasure, was without or door or key. He entered, and saw grass sprouting on the windows, and all the books and benches thick with dust. In his astonishment he began to open and turn the leaves of first one tome and then another, and found many and divers volumes of ancient and foreign works. Some of them had lost several sheets; others were snipped and pared all round the text, and mutilated in various ways. At length, lamenting that the toil and study of so many illustrious men should have passed into the hands of most abandoned wretches, he departed with tears and sighs. Coming to the cloister, he asked a monk whom he met, why those valuable books had been so disgracefully mangled. He answered that the monks, seeking to gain a few soldi, were in the habit of cutting off sheets and making psalters, which they sold to boys. The margins too they manufactured into charms, and sold to women. So then, O man of study, go to and rack your brains; make books that you may come to this!'

What Italy contained of ancient codices soon saw the light. The visit of Poggio Bracciolini to Constance (1414) opened up for Italian scholars the stores that lay neglected in transalpine monasteries. Poggio's office of Apostolic Secretary obliged him to attend the Council of Constance for the purpose of framing reports and composing diplomatic documents. At the same time he had ample leisure on his hands, and this he spent in exploring the libraries of Swiss and Suabian convents. The treasures he unearthed at Reichenau, Weingarten, and above all S. Gallen, restored to Italy many lost masterpieces of Latin literature, and supplied students with full texts of authors who had hitherto been known in mutilated copies. The account he gave of his visit to S. Gallen in a Latin letter to a friend is justly celebrated.[96] After describing the wretched state in which the 'Institutions' of Quintilian had previously existed,[97] he proceeds as follows:-'I verily believe that, if we had not come to the rescue, he [Quintilian] must speedily have perished; for it cannot be imagined that a man magnificent, polished, elegant, urbane, and witty could much longer have endured the squalor of the prison-house in which I found him, the savagery of his jailers, the forlorn filth of the place. He was indeed right sad to look upon, and ragged, like a condemned criminal, with rough beard and matted hair, protesting by his countenance and garb against the injustice of his sentence. He seemed to be stretching out his hands, calling upon the Romans, demanding to be saved from so unmerited a doom. Hard indeed it was for him to bear, that he who had preserved the lives of many by his eloquence and aid, should now find no redresser of his wrongs, no saviour from the unjust punishment awaiting him. But as it often happens, to quote Terence, that what you dare not wish for comes to you by chance, so a good fortune for him, but far more for ourselves, led us, while wasting our time in idleness at Constance, to take a fancy for visiting the place where he was held in prison. The monastery of S. Gallen lies at the distance of some twenty miles from that city. Thither, then, partly for the sake of amusement and partly of finding books, whereof we heard there was a large collection in the convent, we directed our steps. In the middle of a well-stocked library, too large to catalogue at present, we discovered Quintilian, safe as yet and sound, though covered with dust and filthy with neglect and age. The books, you must know, were not housed according to their worth, but were lying in a most foul and obscure dungeon at the very bottom of a tower, a place into which condemned criminals would hardly have been thrust; and I am firmly persuaded that if anyone would but explore those ergastula of the barbarians wherein they incarcerate such men, we should meet with like good fortune in the case of many whose funeral orations have long ago been pronounced. Besides Quintilian, we exhumed the three first books and a half of the fourth book of the "Argonautica" of Flaccus, and the "Commentaries" of Asconius Pedianus upon eight orations of Cicero.' Poggio, immediately after this discovery, set himself to work at transcribing the Quintilian, a labour accomplished in the brief space of thirty-two days. The MS. was then despatched to Lionardo Bruni, who received it with ecstatic welcome, as appears from this congratulatory epistle addressed to Poggio:-

'The republic of letters has reason to rejoice not only in the works you have discovered, but also in those you have still to find. What a glory for you it is to have brought to light by your exertions the writings of the most distinguished authors! Posterity will not forget that MSS. which were bewailed as lost beyond the possibility of restoration, have been recovered, thanks to you. As Camillus was called the second founder of Rome, so may you receive the title of the second author of the works you have restored to the world. Through you we now possess Quintilian entire; before we only boasted of the half of him, and that defective and corrupt in text. O precious acquisition! O unexpected joy! And shall I, then, in truth be able to read the whole of that Quintilian which, mutilated and deformed as it has hitherto appeared, has formed my solace? I conjure you send it me at once, that at least I may set eyes on it before I die.'

In addition to the authors named above, Poggio discovered and copied with his own hand MSS. of Lucretius and Columella. Silius Italicus, Manillas, and Vitruvius owed their resurrection to his industry. At Langres he found a copy of Cicero's oration for C?cina; at Monte Cassino a MS. of Frontinus. Ammianus Marcellinus, Nonius Marcellus, Probus, Flavius Caper, and Eutyches are also to be ranked among the captives freed by him from slavery. In exploring foreign convents where he suspected that ancient authors might lie buried, he spared neither trouble nor expense. 'No severity of winter cold, no snow, no length of journey, no roughness of roads, prevented him from bringing the monuments of literature to light,' wrote Francesco Barbaro.[98] Nor did he recoil from theft, if theft seemed necessary to secure a precious codex. In a letter to Ambrogio Traversari he relates his negotiations with a monk for the fraudulent abduction of an Ammianus and a Livy from a convent library in Hersfeld.[99] Not unfrequently his most golden anticipations with regard to literary treasures were deceived, as when a Dane appeared at the Court of Martin V. bragging of a complete Livy to be found in a Cistercian convent near R?skilde. This man protested he had seen the MS., and described the characters in which it was written with some minuteness. At Poggio's instance the Cardinal Orsini sent off a special messenger to seek for this, which would have been the very ph?nix of MSS. to the Latinists of that period, while Cosimo de' Medici put his agents at Lübeck to work for the same purpose. All their efforts were in vain, however. The Livy could not be discovered, and the Dane passed for a liar, in spite of the corroboration his story received from another traveller.[100] Poggio himself, who would willingly have ransacked Europe for a MS., was jealous of money spent on any other object. In his treatise 'De Infelicitate Principum' he complains that 'these exalted personages [popes and princes] spend their days and their wealth in pleasure, in unworthy pursuits, in pestiferous and destructive wars. So great is their mental torpor that nothing can rouse them to search after the works of excellent writers, by whose wisdom and learning mankind are taught the way to true happiness.' This lamentation, written probably under the unfavourable impression produced upon his mind by the Papal Court, where as yet the spirit of humanism had hardly penetrated, must not be taken in any strict sense. Never was there a time in the world's history when money was spent more freely upon the collection and preservation of MSS., and when a more complete machinery was put in motion for the sake of securing literary treasures. Prince vied with prince, and eminent burgher with burgher, in buying books. The commercial correspondents of the Medici and other great Florentine houses, whose banks and discount offices extended over Europe and the Levant, were instructed to purchase relics of antiquity without regard for cost, and to forward them to Florence. The most acceptable present that could be sent to a king was a copy of a Roman historian. The best credentials which a young Greek arriving from Byzantium could use to gain the patronage of men like Palla degli Strozzi was a fragment of some ancient; the merchandise ensuring the largest profit to a speculator who had special knowledge in such matters was old parchment covered with crabbed characters.

The history of the foundation of libraries will form part of the next chapter. For the present it is requisite to mention some of Poggio's fellow-workmen in the labour of collection. Among these a certain Nicholas of Treves, employed to receive monies due to the Papal Curia in Germany, deserves a place, seeing that in 1429 he sent the most complete extant copy of Plautus to Rome. Bartolommeo da Montepulciano, following the lead of Poggio, pursued investigations while at Constance, and discovered the lost writings of Vegetius and Pompeius Festus. In 1409 Lionardo Bruni chanced upon a good MS. of Cicero's letters at Pistoja, and about the year 1425 a magnificent capture of Cicero's rhetorical treatises was made at Lodi in the Duomo by Gherardo Landriani. The extant works of Tacitus, so ardently desired, were not collected earlier than the reign of Leo.

While Poggio was releasing the Latin authors from their northern prisons, and sending them to walk like princes through the Courts and capitals of Italy, three other scholars devoted no less energy to the collection of Greek MSS. Giovanni Aurispa, on his return from Byzantium in 1423, brought with him 238 codices, while Guarino of Verona and Francesco Filelfo both arrived in Italy heavily laden. There is an old story that Guarino lost a part of his cargo at sea, and landed with hair whitened by the grief this misfortune cost him. Considering the special advantages enjoyed by these three scholars, who were pupils of the learned Manuel Chrysoloras, and before whose eager curiosity the libraries of Byzantium remained open through nearly half a century previous to the fall of the Greek Empire, we have good reason to believe that the greater part of Attic and Alexandrian literature known to the later Greeks was transferred to Italy. The avidity shown by the Florentines for codices and copies, the opportunities afforded by their mercantile connection with Constantinople, and the obvious interest which the Court of Byzantium at that crisis had in gratifying their taste for such acquisitions, contribute to render it unlikely that any of the more important and illustrious authors were destroyed in the taking of the city by the Turk.[101] It is probable that causes similar to those which slowly wrought the ruin of Latin literature in the West-the apathy of an uncultured public, the rancorous animosity of a superstitious clergy, and the decay of students as a class-had long before the age of the Renaissance ruined beyond the possibility of recovery those masterpieces whereof we still deplore the loss.[102] The preservation of Neoplatonic and Patristic literature in comparative completeness, while so much that was more valuable perished, may be ascribed to the theological content of these writings.

Not to render some account of the effect produced upon the minds of scholars in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by the sight of Roman ruins in decay, would be to omit an important branch of the subject I have undertaken. Yet this part of the inquiry leads us into a region somewhat different from that hitherto traversed in the present chapter, since it properly belongs to the history of enthusiasm. No small portion of the motive impulse that determined the Revival was derived from the admiration, curiosity, and awe excited by the very stones of ancient Rome. During the Middle Ages the right point of view for studying the architectural works of the Romans had been lost. History yielded ever more and more to legend, until at last it was believed that demons and magicians had suspended those gigantic vaults in air. Telesmatic virtues were attributed to figures carved on temple-fronts and friezes, while the great name of Virgil attached itself to what remained unhurt of Latin art in Rome and Naples.[103] The Rome of the Mirabilia was supposed to be the handiwork of fiends constrained by poets of the bygone age with spells of power to move hell from its centre. This transference of interest from the real to the fanciful, from the substantial to the visionary, was characteristic of the whole attitude assumed by the mind in the Middle Ages. History, literature, and art alike submitted to the alchemy of the imagination.[104] At the same time the very grossness of these fables testified to the profound impression produced by the ruins of the Eternal City, and to the haunting magic of a memory surviving degradation and decay. When the Anglo-Saxon pilgrims returned from Rome in the eighth century, the fascination of the great works they had seen expressed itself in a memorable prophecy.[105] 'As long as the Coliseum stands, Rome shall stand; when the Coliseum falls, Rome will fall; when Rome falls, the world will fall.'

About the year 1300 a new historic sense appears to have arisen in Italy. Instead of dreams and legends, the positive facts of the past began to have once more their value. This change might be compared to the discovery we make upon the borderland of sleep and waking, when what we fancied was a figure draped in white by our bedside turns out to be the wall with moonlight shining on it. Giovanni Villani, when he gazed upon the baths and amphitheatres of Rome, was not moved to think of the fiends who raised them, but of the buried grandeur of the Roman commonwealth.[106] What Rome once was, Florence may one day become, was the reflection that impelled him to write the chronicle of his native town. Dante, who with Villani witnessed the Jubilee of 1300, cried that the very stones of Rome were sacred. 'Whoso robs her, or despoils her, with blasphemy of act offendeth God, who only for His own use made her holy.'[107] The city was to him the outward symbol and terrestrial station of that God-appointed Monarchy for ruling all the peoples of the earth in peace. His most enthusiastic speculations, as well as the practical policy set forth in his epistles, attached themselves to Rome as a reality; nor did he ever tire of bidding German emperors return and fix their throne upon the bank of Tiber. We know now that this idealism was a delusion, no less incapable of realisation than it was pernicious to the liberties of the Italians. It haunted the imagination of the race, however, until at last, as I have said above, the proper vent was found in humanism.

The same passion for Rome took different form in the mind of another and less noble patriot. It impelled Rienzi to conceive the plan of rehabilitating the Republic. The Popes were far away at Avignon. The emperors seemed to have forgotten Italy. Yet Rome remained, and the mere name of Rome was Empire. Why should not the Senatus Populusque Romanus, whose initials still survived in uncial letters upon blocks of travertine and marble, be restored to place and power? Wandering among those spacious vaults, and lingering beneath the triumphal arches, where the marks of chariot-wheels were traced upon the massive paved work of the Roman ways, the young enthusiast conceived that even he might live to be the Tribune of that people, born invincible, and called by destiny to rule the world. With what energy he devoted himself to studying the histories of Livy, Sallust, and Valerius Maximus; how he strove to master the meaning of inscriptions found among the wrecks of Rome; with what eloquence he moved his fellow-citizens to sympathy-are familiar matters not only to scholars, but to readers of romance. His vision of the restored Republic seemed for a moment destined to become reality. The Romans placed the power of life and death, of revenues and armies, in the hands of the seer, who had stirred them by his rhetoric. Rienzi took rank among the potentates of Italy. Even the Papal Court acknowledged him.

What followed proved the political incapacity of the new dictator, his want of critical insight into the ideal he had set before himself. There is something both pathetic and ridiculous in the vanity displayed by this barber's son exalted to a place among the princes. Not satisfied with calling himself Tribune and Knight, the style he affected in his correspondence with Clement VI. ran as follows:-'Candidatus, Spiritus Sancti Miles, Nicolaus Severus et Clemens, Liberator Urbis, Zelator Itali?, Amator Orbis, et Tribunus Augustus.' Like Icarus, he spread these waxen wings to the sun's noontide blaze. The same extravagant confusion of things sacred and profane, classical and medi?val, marked the pageantry of his State ceremonials in Rome. On August 15, 1347, in celebration of his election to the Tribunate, he assumed six crowns-of ivy, myrtle, laurel, oak, olive, and gilt silver. His arms were blazoned with the keys of Peter and the letters S.P.Q.R. His senatorial sceptre was surmounted, not with the eagle or the wolf of Romulus, but with a golden ball and cross enclosing the relic of a saint. The poetic fancy could not have suggested a more striking allegory to illustrate an undiscriminating reverence for the Imperial and Pontifical prestige of Rome, than was presented in this tragic farce of actual history. Not in this way, by a mixture of Christian and Pagan titles, by emblematic pomp, by heraldry and declamation, could the old Republic be brought to life again. The very attempt to do so proved how far the mind of man, awaking from the long sleep of the Middle Ages, was removed from the severe simplicity that gave its strength to ancient Rome. Along those giddy parapets of fame we watch Rienzi walking through his months of glory like a somnambule sustained by an internal dream. That he should fall was inevitable. With him expired the Utopia of a Roman commonwealth, to be from time to time revived as an ineffectual fancy in the brains of a few visionaries.[108]

The relations of Petrarch to Rienzi offer matter for curious reflection, while they illustrate the part played by the enthusiasm for ancient Rome in the early history of humanism. Petrarch and Rienzi had been friends and correspondents before the emergence of the latter into public notice; and when the Tribune seemed about to satisfy the dearest desire of the poet's heart by re-establishing the Roman commonwealth, Petrarch addressed him with an animated letter of congratulation and encouragement.[109] In his charmed eyes he seemed a hero, vir magnanimus, worthy of the ancient world, a new Romulus, a third Brutus, a Camillus. The Roman burghers, that scum and sediment of countless races, barbarised by the lingering miseries of the Middle Ages, needed nothing, it appeared, but words and wishes to make them once again cives Romani, no longer clamorous for bread and games, but ready to reconquer all their ancestors had lost.[110] 'Where,' cried Petrarch, 'can the empire of the world be found, except in Rome? Who can dispute the Roman right? What force can stand against the name of Romans?' Neither the patriot nor the scholar discerned that the revival they were destined to inaugurate was intellectual. Though the spirit of the times refused a political Renaissance, refused to Italy the maintenance of even such freedom as she then possessed, far more refused a resuscitation of ancient Rome's imperial sway, yet both Rienzi and Petrarch persisted in believing that, because they glowed with fervour for the past, because they could read inscriptions, because they expressed their desires eloquently, the world's great age was certain to begin anew. It was a capital fault of the Renaissance to imagine that words could work wonders, that a rhetorician's stylus might become the wand of Prospero. Seeming passed for being in morals, politics, and all affairs of life. I have already touched on this as a capital defect in Petrarch's character; but it was a weakness inherent not only in him and in the age he inaugurated, but one, moreover, that has influenced the whole history of the Italians for evil. Sounding phrases like the barbaros expellere of Julius II., like the va fuori d'Italia of Garibaldian hymns, from time to time have roused the nation to feverish enthusiasm, too soon succeeded by dejected apathy. When the inefficiency of Rienzi was proved, all that remained for Petrarch was to warn and scold.

The interest excited in Petrarch by the sight of Rome's ruins was important for his humanistic ideal. They stirred him as a moralist, an antiquarian, and a man who owed his mental vigour to the past. He tells how often he used to climb above the huge vaults of the Baths of Diocletian in company with his friend Giovanni Colonna.[111] Seated there among the flowering shrubs and scented herbs that clothed decay with loveliness, they held discourse concerning the great men of old, and deplored the mutability of all things human. Whatever the poet had read of Roman grandeur was brought back to his mind with vivid meaning during his long solitary walks. He never doubted that he knew for certain where Evander's palace stood, and where the cave of Cacus opened on the Tiber. The difficulties of modern antiquarian research had not been yet suggested, and his fancy was free to map out the topography of the seven hills as pleased him best. Yet he complained that nowhere was less known about Rome than in Rome itself.[112] This ignorance he judged the most fatal obstacle to the resurrection of the city.[113] The palaces where dwelt those heroes of the past, had fallen into ruins; the temples of the gods were desecrated; the triumphal arches were crumbling; the very walls had yielded to decay. None of the Romans cared to arrest destruction; they even robbed the marble columns and entablatures in order to deck Naples with the spoils.[114] The last remnants of the city would soon, he exclaimed, be levelled with the ground. Time has been unable to destroy them; but man was ruining what Time had spared.[115]

There is no doubt that, shortly before the date of Petrarch's visits to Rome, the city had suffered grievously in its monuments. We know, for instance, that the best preserved of the theatres, baths, and tombs formed the residences and fortresses of nobles in the Middle Ages; and when we read that in 1258 the senator Brancaleone found it necessary to destroy one hundred and forty of these fortified dwellings, we obtain a standard for measuring the injury that must have ensued to precious works of classic architecture. The ruins, moreover, as Petrarch hinted, had been used as quarries. What was worse, the burghers burned the marbles, rich, perhaps, with inscriptions and carved bas-reliefs, for lime. We shall shortly see what Poggio relates upon this topic. For the present it will suffice to quote an epigram of Pius II., written some time after the revival of enthusiasm for antiquity:-

Oblectat me, Roma, tuas spectare ruinas,

Ex cujus lapsu gloria prisca patet.

Sed tuus hic populus muris defossa vetustis

Calcis in obsequium marmora dura coquit.

Impia ter centum si sic gens egerit annos,

Nullum hic indicium nobilitatis erit.[116]

Poggio Bracciolini opens a new epoch in Roman topography. The ruins that had moved the superstitious wonder of the Middle Ages, that had excited Rienzi to patriotic enthusiasm, and Petrarch to reflections on the instability of human things, were now for the first time studied in a truly antiquarian spirit. Poggio read them like a book, comparing the testimony they rendered with that of Livy, Vitruvius, and Frontinus, and seeking to compile a catalogue of the existing fragments of old Rome. The first section of his treatise 'De Varietate Fortun?,' forms by far the most important source of information we possess relating to the state of Rome in the fifteenth century.[117] It appears that the Baths of Caracalla and Diocletian could still boast of columns and marble incrustations, but that within Poggio's own recollection the marbles had been stripped from C?cilia Metella's tomb, and the so-called Temple of Concord had been pillaged.[118] Among the ruins ascribed to the period of the Republic are mentioned a bridge, an arch, a tomb, a temple, a building on the Capitol, and the pyramid of Cestius.[119] Besides these, Poggio enumerates, as referable chiefly to the Imperial age, eleven temples, seven therm?, the Arches of Titus, Severus, and Constantine, parts of the Arches of Trajan, Faustina, and Gallienus, the Coliseum, the Theatres of Pompey and Marcellus, the Circus Agonalis and Circus Maximus, the Columns of Trajan and Antonine, the two horses ascribed to Pheidias and Praxiteles, together with other marble statues, one bronze equestrian statue, and the mausoleums of Augustus and Hadrian.

We have to regret that Poggio's description was subservient and introductory to a rhetorical dissertation. Had he applied himself to the task of tabulating more minutely what he had observed, his work would have been infinitely precious to the arch?ologist. No one knew more about the Roman buildings than he did. No one felt the impression of their majesty in desolation more profoundly. The mighty city appeared to him, he said, like the corpse of a giant, like a queen in slavery. The sight of her magnificence, despoiled and shorn of ornaments as she had been, moved him daily to deeper admiration. It was his custom to lead strangers from point to point among the ruins, in order to enjoy the effect produced upon fresh minds by their stupendous evidence of strength and greatness in decay.

The pathos of this former empress of the world exposed to insult and indignity had not been first felt by Poggio. Petrarch described her as an aged matron with grey hair and pale cheeks, whose torn and sordid raiment ill accorded with the nobleness of her demeanour.[120] Fazio degli Uberti personified her as a majestic woman, wrapped around with rags, who pointed out to him the ruins of her city, 'to the end that he might understand how fair she was in years of old.'[121]

In this way a sentimental feeling for the relics of the past grew up and flourished side by side with the arch?ological interest they excited. The literature of the Renaissance abounds in matter that might be used in illustration of this remark,[122] while nothing was commoner in art than to paint for backgrounds broken arches and decayed buildings, 'whose ruins are even pitied.' The double impulse of romantic sentiment and antiquarian curiosity, set going in this age of the Revival, contributed no little to the development of architecture, sculpture, and painting. In the section of my work which deals with the fine arts in Italy will be found the proper sequel to this subject. Meanwhile the history of antiquarian research in Rome itself will be resumed in another chapter of this volume.

Among the representative men of the first period of the Revival must be mentioned an enthusiast who devoted his whole life to topographical studies and to the copying of classical inscriptions. Ciriaco de' Pizzicolli was born about 1404 at Ancona, and from this town he took the name he bears among the learned. Like many other pioneers of erudition, he was educated for commerce, and had slender opportunities for acquiring the dead languages in his youth. His manhood was spent in restless journeying, at first undertaken for the purposes of trade, but afterwards for the sole object of discovery. Smitten with the zeal for classical antiquity, he made himself a tolerable Latin scholar, and gained a fair knowledge of Greek. In the course of his long wanderings he ransacked every part of Italy, Greece, and the Greek islands, collecting medals, gems, and fragments of sculpture, buying manuscripts, transcribing records, and amassing a miscellaneous store of arch?ological information. The enthusiasm that possessed him was so untempered by sobriety that it excited the suspicion of contemporaries. Some regarded him as a man of genuine learning; others spoke of him as a flighty, boastful, and untrustworthy fanatic.[123] The mistakes he made in copying inscriptions depreciated the general value of his labours, while he was even accused of having passed off fabrications on the credulity of the public. The question of his alleged forgeries has been discussed at length by Tiraboschi.[124] To settle it at this distance of time is both unimportant and impossible. While we may well believe that Ciriac was a conceited enthusiast, accepting as genuine what he ought to have rejected, and interpreting according to his fancy rather than the letter of his text, his life retains real value for the student of the Revival. In him the curiosity of the new age reached its acme of expansiveness. The passion for discovery pursued him from shore to shore, and the vision of the past, to be reconquered by the energy of the present, haunted his imagination till the moment of his death. When asked what object he had set his heart upon in those perpetual journeyings, he answered, 'I go to awake the dead.' That word, the motto for the first age of the Revival, explains the fanaticism of Ciriac, and is a sufficient title to fame.

* * *