intellectual life; they resulted in the great age of Italy. It was this in the main that made possible the popular fervor for the things of the mind in the Italian Renaissance, to which nothing else in the world’s history is comparable but the popular enthusiasm of the modern Revolution for liberty. Dante gave his country a native language, the Humanists gave it the literature of Rome, the Hellenists the literature of Greece; poets sang and artists painted with a loftiness and dignity of imagination, a sweetness and delicacy of sentiment, an energy and reach of thought, a music of verse and harmony of line and color, still unsurpassed. The gifts which these men brought were not for a few, but for the many who shared in this mastering, absorbing interest in the things of the mind, in beauty and wisdom, which was the vital spirit of the Italian Renaissance.
Thus it happened that when the German printers brought over the Alps the art which was to do so much toward civilizing the North, they found in Italy a civilization already culminated, hastening on, indeed, to a swift decline; they found the people already in possession of the manuscripts which they came to reproduce and multiply, and the princes, like Frederick of Urbino,[1] “ashamed to own a printed book” among their splendid collections, where every art seemed to vie in making beautiful their volumes of vellum and velvet. Wood-engraving, too, which here as elsewhere accompanied printing, could be of no use in spreading ideas and preparing the way for a popular knowl-
- ↑ Vespas. Fior., p. 129. Quoted in Burckhardt, “The Civilization of the Period of the Renaissance in Italy.” Translated by S. G. C. Middlemore. Vol. i., p. 271. London, 1878.
