supplied to art by mediaeval traditions and humanistic enthusiasm were worked out.  Nor was this all.  The Renaissance had created a critical spirit which penetrated every branch of art and letters.  It was not possible to advance further on the old lines; yet painters, sculptors, architects, and poets of the rising generation had before their eyes the masterpieces of their predecessors, in their minds the precepts of the learned.  All alike were rendered awkward and self-conscious by the sense of laboring at a disadvantage, and by the dread of academical censorship.

In truth, this critical spirit, which was the final product of the Renaissance in Italy, favored the development of new powers in the nation:  it hampered workers in the elder spheres of art, literature, and scholarship; but it set thinkers upon the track of those investigations which we call scientific.  I shall endeavor, in a future chapter, to show how the Italians were now upon the point of carrying the ardor of the Renaissance into fresh fields of physical discovery and speculation, when their evolution was suspended by the Catholic Reaction.  But here it must suffice to observe that formalism had succeeded by the operation of natural influences to the vigor and inventiveness of the national genius in the main departments of literature and fine art.

If we study the development of other European races, we shall find that each of them in turn, at its due season, passed through similar phases.  The mediaeval period ends in the efflorescence of a new delightful energy, which gives a Rabelais, a Shakspere, a Cervantes to the world.  The Renaissance riots itself away in Marinism, Gongorism, Euphuism, and the affectations of the Hotel Rambouillet.  This age is succeeded by a colder, more critical, more formal age of obedience to fixed canons, during which scholarly efforts are made to purify style and impose laws on taste.  The ensuing period of sense is also marked by profounder inquiries into nature and more exact analysis of mental operations.  The correct school of poets, culminating in Dryden and Pope, holds sway in England; while Newton, Locke, and Bentley extend the sphere of science.  In France the age of Rabelais and Montaigne yields place to the age of Racine and Descartes.  Germany was so distracted by religious wars, Spain was so down-trodden by the Inquisition, that they do not offer equally luminous examples.[8] It may be added that in all these nations the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries are marked by a similar revolt against formality and common sense, to which we give the name of the Romantic movement.

[Footnote 8:  With regard to Germany, see Mr. T. S. Perry’s acute and philosophical study, entitled From Opitz to Lessing (Boston).]