lutions of opinion, had become odious to the large majority of the nation; but Protestantism had not yet condensed into a compact body of sectarian doctrines. The best work of our dramatists, so far from reticent, so comprehensive as it is, reveals no theological orthodoxy, no polemical antagonism to dogmatic creeds. The poet, whether he sounds the depths of sceptical despair or soars aloft on wings of aspiration, appeals less to religious principle than to human emotion, to doubts and hopes instinctive in the breast of man. It is as though in this transition state of thought, humanity were left alone, surveying with clear eyes the universe, sustained by its own adolescent fearlessness and strength. The fields, again, of wealth, discovery, and science, over which we plod with measured and methodic footsteps, spread before those men like a fairyland of palaces and groves, teeming with strange adventures, offering rich harvests of heroic deeds. To the New World Raleigh sailed with the courage of a Paladin, the boyishness of Astolf mounted on his hippogriff. He little dreamed what unromantic scenes of modern life, what monotonous migrations of innumerable settlers, he inaugurated on the shores of El Dorado. The Old World was hardly less a land of wonders. When Faustus clasped Helen in a vision ; when Miramont protested:

Though I can speak no Greek, I love the sound on 't ;
It goes so thundering as it conjured devils :

both characters expressed the spirit of an age when scholarship was a romantic passion. Even the pioneers of science in the seventeenth century were poets.

Bruno compares

Icarus.

THE RENAISSANCE.

29

himself upon his philosophic flight to

Bacon founds the inductive method upon metaphors Idola Specûs, Vindemia Inductionis. Galileo, to his English contemporaries, is 'the Italian star-wright.'

III.

The genius of youthfulness, renascent, not newborn, was dominant in that age. Adam stepped forth again in Eden, gazed with bold eyes upon the earth and stars, felt himself master there, plucked fruit from the forbidden tree. But though still young, though 'bright as at creation's day,' this now rejuvenescent Adam had six thousand centuries of conscious life, how many countless centuries of dim unconscious life, behind him! Not the material world alone, not the world of his unquenchable self alone, not the world of inscrutable futurity alone, but, in addition to all this, a ruinous world of his own works awaiting reconstruction lay around him. The nations moved ' immersed in rich foreshadowings' of the future, amid the dust of creeds and empires, which crumbled like 'the wrecks of a dissolving dream.' Refreshed with sleep, the giant of the modern age rose up strong to shatter and create. Thought and action were no longer to be fettered. Instead of tradition and prescription, passion and instinct ruled the hour. Every nerve was sensitive. to pleasure bordering on pain, and pain that lost itself in ecstasy. Men saw and coveted and grasped at their desire. If they hated, they slew. If they loved and could not win, again they slew. If they climbed to the height of their ambition and fell toppling down,

they died with smiles upon their lips like Marlowe's Mortimer :

Weep not for Mortimer,
That scorns the world, and, as a traveller,
Goes to discover countries yet unknown.

Turbulence, not the turbulence of a medieval barony, but the turbulence of artists, lovers, pleasure-seekers, aspirants after pomp and spiritual empire, ruffled the ocean of existence. The characters of men were harshly marked, and separated by abrupt distinctions. They had not been rubbed down by contact and culture into uniformity. Not conformity to established laws of taste, but eccentricity betokening emergence of the inner self, denoted breeding. To adopt foreign fashions, to cut the beard into fantastic shapes, to flourish in particoloured garments, to coin new oaths, to affect a style of speech and manner at variance with one's neighbours, passed for manliness. Everyone lived in his own humour then, and openly avowed his tastes. You might distinguish the inhabitants of different countries, the artisans of different crafts, the professors of different sciences the lawyer, the physician, the courtier, or the churchman-by their clothes, their gait, their language. Instead of curbing passions or concealing appetites, men gloried in their exercise. They veiled nothing which savoured of virility; and even convernation lacked the reserve of decency which civilised Society throws over it.

PERSONALITY IN THE RENAISSANCE.

31

IV.

Benvenuto Cellini, in his autobiography, presents a graphic picture of the times; and what we know of life in other European countries at that epoch, justifies us in taking that picture as fairly typical. He and the Italians of his century killed their rivals in the streets by day; they girded on their daggers when they went into a court of justice; they sickened to the death with disappointed vengeance or unhappy love; they dragged a faithless mistress by the hair about their rooms; they murdered an adulterous wife with their own hands, and hired assassins to pursue her paramour; lying for months in prison, unaccused or uncondemned, in daily dread of poison, they read the Bible and the sermons of Savonarola, and made their dungeons echo with psalm-singing; they broke their fetters, dropped from castle walls, swam moats and rivers, dreamed that angels had been sent to rescue them; they carved Madonna and Adonis on the self-same shrine, paying indiscriminate devotion to Ganymede and Aphrodite ; they confused the mythology of Olympus with the mysteries of Sinai and Calvary, the oracles of necromancers with the voice of prophets, the authority of pagan poets with the inspiration of Isaiah and S. Paul; they prayed in one breath for vengeance on their enemies, for favour with the women whom they loved, for succour in their homicidal acts, for Paradise in the life to come; they flung defiance at popes, and trembled for absolution before a barefoot friar; they watched salamanders playing in flames, saw aureoles

of light reflected from their heads upon the morning dew, turned dross to gold with alchemists, raised spirits in the ruins of deserted amphitheatres; they passed men dying on the road, and durst not pity them, because a cardinal had left them there to perish; they took the Sacrament from hands of prelates whom they had guarded with drawn swords at doors of infamy and riot. The wildest passions, the grossest superstitions, the most fervent faith, the coldest cynicism, the gravest learning, the darkest lusts, the most delicate sense of beauty, met in the same persons, and were fused into one wayward glittering humanity. Ficino, who revealed Plato to Europe, pondered on the occult virtue of amulets. Cardan, a pioneer of physical science, wrote volumes of predictions gathered from the buzzings of a wasp, and died in order to fulfil his horoscope. Bembo, a prince of the Church, warned hopeful scholars against reading the Bible lest they should contaminate their style. Aretino, the byeword of obscenity and impudence, penned lives of saints, and won the praise of women like Vittoria Colonna. A pope, to please the Sultan, poisoned a Turkish prince, and was rewarded by the present of Christ's seamless coat. A Duke of Urbino poignarded a cardinal in the streets of Bologna. Alexander VI. regaled his daughter in the Vatican with naked ballets, and dragged the young lord of Faenza, before killing him, through outrages for which there is no language. Every student of Renaissance Italy and France can multiply these instances. It is enough to have suggested how, and with what salience. of unmasked appetite, the springs of life were opened