to the ideal of their age, and that ideal was one to which a painter rather than a poet might successfully aspire.  A succession of pictures, harmoniously composed and delicately toned to please the mental eye, satisfied the taste of the Italians.  But, however exquisite in design, rich in colour, and complete in execution this literary work may be, it strikes a Northern student as wanting in the highest elements of genius—­sublimity of imagination, dramatic passion, energy and earnestness of purpose.  In like manner, he finds it hard to appreciate those didactic compositions on trifling or prosaic themes, which delighted the Italians for the very reason that their workmanship surpassed their matter.  These defects, as we judge them, are still more apparent in the graver branches of literature.  In an essay or a treatise we do not so much care for well-balanced disposition of parts or beautifully rounded periods, though elegance may be thought essential to classic masterpieces, as for weighty matter and trenchant observations.  Having the latter, we can dispense at need with the former.  The Italians of the Renaissance, under the sway of the fine arts, sought after form, and satisfied themselves with rhetoric.  Therefore we condemn their moral disquisitions and their criticisms as the flimsy playthings of intellectual voluptuaries.  Yet the right way of doing justice to these stylistic trifles is to regard them as products of an all-embracing genius for art, in a people whose most serious enthusiasms were aesthetic.

The speech of the Italians at that epoch, their social habits, their ideal of manners, their standard of morality, the estimate they formed of men, were alike conditioned and qualified by art.  It was an age of splendid ceremonies and magnificent parade, when the furniture of houses, the armour of soldiers, the dress of citizens, the pomp of war, and the pageantry of festival were invariably and inevitably beautiful.  On the meanest articles of domestic utility, cups and platters, door-panels and chimney-pieces, coverlets for beds and lids of linen-chests, a wealth of artistic invention was lavished by innumerable craftsmen, no less skilled in technical details than distinguished by rare taste.  From the Pope upon S. Peter’s chair to the clerks in a Florentine counting-house, every Italian was a judge of art.  Art supplied the spiritual oxygen, without which the life of the Renaissance must have been atrophied.  During that period of prodigious activity the entire nation seemed to be endowed with an instinct for the beautiful, and with the capacity for producing it in every conceivable form.  As we travel through Italy at the present day, when “time, war, pillage, and purchase” have done their worst to denude the country of its treasures, we still marvel at the incomparable and countless beauties stored in every burgh and hamlet.  Pacing the picture galleries of Northern Europe, the country seats of English nobles, and the palaces of