appeared undecided, until the fourth by happy fate secured the future of her people.  It is not to be wondered that, in these circumstances, a mournful discouragement should have descended on the age; that men should have become more dubitative; that arts and letters should have seemed to pine upon unfertile ground.  The nutriment they needed was absorbed by plants of fiercer and ranker growth, religious hatreds, political greeds, relentless passions burning in the hearts of princes and of populations.

IX.

Italy had already given so much of mental and social civilization to Europe, that her quiescence at this epoch can scarcely supply a substantial theme for rhetorical lamentations.  Marino and Guido Reni prove that the richer veins of Renaissance art and poetry had been worked out.  The lives of Aldus the younger and Muretus show that humanism was well-nigh exhausted on its native soil.  This will not, however, prevent us from deploring the untimely frost cast by persecution on Italy’s budding boughs of knowledge.  While we rejoice in Galileo, we must needs shed tears of fiery wrath over the passion of Campanella and the stake of Bruno.  Meanwhile the tree of genius was ever green and vital in that Saturnian land of culture.  Poetry, painting, sculpture, and architecture, having borne their flowers and fruits, retired to rest.  Scholarship faded; science was nipped in its unfolding season by unkindly influences.  But music put forth lusty shoots and flourished, yielding a new paradise of harmless joy, which even priests could grudge not to the world, and which lulled tyranny to sleep with silvery numbers.

Thanks be to God that I who pen these pages, and that you who read them, have before us in this year of grace the spectacle of a resuscitated Italy!  In this last quarter of the nineteenth century, the work of her heroes, Vittorio Emmanuele, Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Cavour, stands firmly founded.  The creation of united Italy, that latest birth of the Italian genius, that most impossible of dreamed-of triumphs through long ages of her glory and greatness, compensates for all that she has borne in these three hundred years.  Now that Rome is no longer the seat of a cosmopolitan theocracy, but the capital of a regenerated people; now that Venice joins hands with Genoa, forgetful of Curzola and Chioggia; now that Florence and Pisa and Siena stand like sisters on the sacred Tuscan soil, while Milan has no strife with Naples, and the Alps and sea-waves gird one harmony of cities who have drowned their ancient spites in amity,—­the student of the splendid and the bitter past may pause and bow his head in gratitude to Heaven and swear that, after all, all things are well.

X.