practice of Italian poetry. Their work is the first absolutely modern work,—modern in the sense of having absorbed the stores of classic learning and reproduced those treasures in forms of simple, natural, native beauty. Boiardo occupies a similar position by the fusion of classic mythology with chivalrous romance in his Orlando Innamorato. But the victor's laurels were reserved for Ariosto, whose Orlando Furioso is the purest and most perfect extant example of Renaissance poetry. It was not merely in what they had acquired and assimilated from the classics that these poets showed the transformation effected in the field of literature by humanism. The whole method and spirit of medieval art had been abandoned. That of the Cinque Cento is positive, defined, mundane. The deity, if deity there be, that rules in it, is beauty. Interest is confined to the actions, passions, sufferings and joys of human life, to its pathetic, tragic, humorous and sentimental incidents. Of the state of souls beyond the grave we hear and are supposed to care nothing. In the drama the pedantry of the Revival, which had not injured romantic literature, made itself perniciously felt. Rules were collected from Horace and Aristotle. Seneca was chosen as the model of tragedy; Plautus and Terence supplied the groundwork of comedy. Thus in the plays of Rucellai, Trissino, Sperone and other tragic poets the nobler elements of humanism, considered as a revelation of the world and man, obtained no free development. Even the comedies of the best authors are too observant of Latin precedents, although some pieces of Machiavelli, Ariosto, Aretino, Cecchi and Gelli are admirable for vivid delineation of contemporary manners.
The relation of the plastic arts to the revival of learning is similar to that which has been sketched in the case of poetry. Cimabue started with work which owed nothing directly to antiquity. At about the same time Niccola Pisano (d. 1278) studied the style of sculpture in fragments of Graeco-Roman marbles. His manner influenced Giotto, who set painting on a Fine arts. forward path. Fortunately for the unimpeded expansion of Italian art, little was brought to light of anti ue workmanship during the 14th and 15th centuries. The classical stimulus came to painters, sculptors and architects chiefly through literature. Therefore there was narrow scope for imitation, and the right spirit of humanism displayed itself in a passionate study of perspective, nature and the nude. Yet we find in the writings of Ghiberti and Alberti, we notice in the masterpieces of these men and their compeers Brunelleschi and Donatello, how even in the 15th century the minds of artists were fascinated by what survived of classic grace and science. Gradually, as the race became penetrated wit antique thought, the earlier Christian motives of the arts yielded to pagan subjects. Gothic architecture, which had always flourished feebly on Italian soil. was supplanted by a hybrid Roman style. The study of Vitruvius gave strong support to that pseudo-classic manner which, when it had reached its final point in Palladio's work, overspread the whole of Europe and dominated taste during two centuries. But the perfect plastic art of Italy, the pure art of the Cinque Cento, the painting of Raphael, Da Vinci, Titian and Correggio, the sculpture of Donatello, Michelangelo and Sansovino, the architecture of Bramante, Omodeo and the Venetian Lombardi, however much imbued with the spirit of the classical revival, takes rank beside the poetry of Ariosto as a free intelligent product of the Renaissance. That is to say, it is not so much an outcome of studies in antiquity as an exhibition of emancipated modern genius fired and illuminated by the masterpieces of the past. It indicates a separation from the middle ages, inasmuch as it is permanently natural. Its religion is joyous, sensuous, dramatic, terrible, but in each and all of its many-sided manifestations strictly human. Its touch on classical mythology is original, rarely imitative or pedantic. The art of the Renaissance was an apocalypse of the beauty of the world and man in unaffected spontaneity, without side thou hts for piety or erudition, inspired by pure delight in loveliness and harmony for their own sakes.
In the fields of science and philosophy humanism wrought similar important changes. Petrarch began by waging relentless war against the logicians and materialists of his own day. With the advance made in Greek studies scholastic methods of thinking fell into contemptuous oblivion. The newly aroused curiosity for nature encouraged men like Alberti. Science and philosophy. Da Vinci, Toscanelli and Da Porta to make practical experiments, penetrate the working of physical forces, and invent scientific instruments. Anatomy began to be studied, and the time was not far distant when Titian should lend his pencil to the epoch-making treatise of Vesalius. The middle ages had been satisfied with absurd and visionary notions about the world around them, while the body of man was regarded with too much suspicion to be studied. Now the right method of interrogating nature with patience and loving admiration was instituted. At the same time the texts of ancient authors supplied hints which led to discoveries so far-reaching in their results as those of Copernicus, Columbus and Galileo. In philosophy, properly so called, the humanistic scorn for medieval dullness and obscurity swept away theological metaphysics as valueless. But at first little beyond empty rhetoric and clumsy compilation was substituted. The ethical treatises of the scholars are deficient in substance, while Ficino's attempt to revive Platonism betrays an uncritical conception of his master's drift. It was something, however, to have shaken off the shackles of ecclesiastical authority; and, even if a new authority, that of the ancients, was accepted in its stead, still progress was being made toward sounder methods of analysis. This is noticeable in Pomponazzo’s system of materialism, based on the interpretation of Aristotle, but revealing a virile spirit of disinterested and unprejudiced research. The thinkers of southern Italy, Telesio, Bruno and Campanella, at last opened the two chief lines on which modern speculation has since moved. Telesio and Campanella may be termed the predecessors of Bacon. Bruno was the precursor of the idealistic schools. All three alike strove to disengage their minds from classical as well as ecclesiastical authority, roving that the emancipation of the will had been accomplished. It must be added that their writings, like every other product of the Renaissance, except its purest poetry and art, exhibit a hybrid between medieval and modern tendencies. Childish ineptitudes are mingled with intuitions of maturest wisdom, and seeds of future thought germinate in the decaying refuse of past systems.
Humanism in its earliest stages was uncritical. It absorbed the relics of antiquity with omnivorous appetite, and with very imperfect sense of the distinction between worse and better work. Yet it led in process of time to criticism. The critique of literature began in the lecture-room of Politian, in the printing-house of Aldus, and in the school of Vittorino. The critiqueCriticism. of Roman law started, under Politian's auspices, upon a more liberal course than that which had been followed by the powerful but narrow-sighted glossators of Bologna. Finally, in the court of Naples arose that most formidable of all critical engines, the critique of established ecclesiastical traditions and spurious historical documents. Valla by one vigorous effort destroyed the False Decretals and exposed the Donation of Constantine to ridicule, paving the way for the polemic carried on against the dubious pretensions of the papal throne by scholars of the Reformation. A similar criticism, conducted less on lines of erudition than of persiflage and irony, ransacked the moral abuses of the church and played around the very foundations of Christianity. This was tolerated with approval by men who repeated Leo X.'s witty epigram: “What profit has not that fable of Christ brought us l" The same critical and philosophic spirit working on the materials of history produced a new science, the honours of which belong to Machiavelli. He showed, on the one side, how the history of a people can be written with a recognition of fixed principles, and at the same time with an artistic feeling for personal and dramatic episodes. On the other side, he addressed himself to the analysis of man considered as a political being, to the anatomy of constitutions and the classification of governments, to the study of motives underlying public action, the secrets of success and the causes of failure in the conduct of affairs. The unscrupulous rigour with which he applied his scientific method, and the sinister deductions he thought himself justified in drawing from the results it yielded, excited terror and repulsion. Nevertheless, a department had been added to the intellectual empire of mankind, in which fellow-workers, like Guicciardini at Florence, and subsequently Sarpi at Venice, were not slow to follow the path traced by Machiavelli.
The object of the foregoing paragraphs has been to show in what way the positive, inquisitive, secular, exploratory spirit of the Renaissance, when toned and controlled by humanism, penetrated the regions of literature, art, philosophy and science. It becomes at this point of much moment to consider how social manners in Italy were modified by the same causes, since the Education. type developed there was in large measure communicated together with the new culture to the rest of Europe. The first subject to be noticed under this heading is education. What has come to be called a classical education was the immediate product of the Italian Renaissance. The universities of Bologna, Padua and Salerno had been famous through the middle ages for the study of law, physics and medicine; and during the 15th and 16th centuries the first two still enjoyed celebrity in these faculties. But at this period no lecture-rooms were so crowded as those in which professors of antique literature and language read passages from the poets and orators, taught Greek, and commented upon the systems of philosophers. The medieval curriculum offered no defined place for the new learning of the Revival, which had indeed no recognized name. Chairs had therefore to be founded under the title of rhetoric, from which men like Chrysoloras and Guarino, Filelfo and Politian expounded orally to hundreds of eager students from every town of Italy and eve nation in Europe. their accumulated knowledge of antiquity. gnc mass of Greek and Roman erudition, including history and metaphysics. law and science, civic institutions and the art of war, mythology and magistracies, metrical systems and oratory, agriculture and astronomy, domestic manners and religious rites, grammar and philology, biography and numismatics, formed the miscellaneous subject-matter of this so-styled rhetoric. Notes taken at these lectures supplied young scholars with hints for further exploration; and a certain tradition of treating antique authors for the display of general learning, as 'well as
for the elucidation of their texts, came into vogue, which has
