greater originality, it is in this Ship of Fools, and in Lydgate's Dance of Death, bitter buffooneries, sad gaieties, which, in the hands of artists. and poets, were having their run throughout Europe. They mock at each other, grotesquely and gloomily; poor, dull, and vulgar figures, but up in a ship, or made to dance on their tomb to the sound of a fddle, played by a grinning skeleton. At the end of all this mouldy talk, and amid the disgust which they have conceived for each other, ■ clown, a tavern Triboulet,' composer of little jeering and macaronic verse Skelton makes his appearance, a virulent pamphleteer, who, junbling together French, English, Latin phrases, with slang, and fashionable words, invented words, intermingled with short rhymes, fabricates a sort of literary mud, with which he bespatters Wolsey and the bishops. Style, metre, rhyme, language, art of every kind, is at an end; beneath the vain parade of official style there is only a head of rubbish. Yet, as he says,

2

'Though my rhyme be ragged,
Tattered and gagged,

Rudely rain-beaten,

Rusty, moth-eaten,

Yf ye take welle therewitho,
It hath in it some pithe.'

It is full of political animus, sensual liveliness, English and popular instincts; it lives. It is a coarse life, still elementary, swarming with ignoble vermin, like that which appears in a great decomposing body. It is life, nevertheless, with its two great features which it is destined to display the hatred of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which is the Reformation; the return to the senses and to natural life, which is the Renaissance.

1 The court fool in Victor Hugo's drama of Le Roi s'amuse.—TR.

* Died 1529; Poet Laureate 1489. His Bouge of Court, his Crown of Laurel, his Elegy on the Death of the Earl of Northumberland, are well written, and belong to official poetry.

BOOK II.

THE RENAISSANCE.

CHAPTER I.

The Pagan Renaissance.

1. MANNERS OF THE TIME.

the

Ildes which men had formed of the world, since the dissolution of the ad society-How and why human inventiveness reappears-The form spirit of the Renaissance-The representation of objects is imitative, uharacteristic, and complete.

IL Why the ideal changes-Improvement of the state of man in Europe-In England-Peace - Industry-Commerce - Pasturage Agriculture Growth of public wealth-Buildings and furniture - The palace, meals and habits-Court pageantries-Celebrations under Elizabeth

under James I.

ment.

Masques

III. Manners of the people-Pageants-Theatres-Village feasts-Pagan developIV. Models--The ancients-Translation and study of classical authors - Sympathy for the manners and mythology of the ancients-The moderns-Taste for Italian writings and ideas-Poetry and painting in Italy were pagan-The ideal is the strong and happy man, limited by the present world.

2. POETRY.

1. The English Renaissance is the Renaissance of the Saxon genius.

II. The forerunners-The Earl of Surrey-His feudal and chivalrous life-His English individual character-His serious and melancholy poems-His conception of intimate love.

III. His

style-His masters, Petrarch and Virgil-His progress, power, precocious perfection—Birth of art-Weaknesses, imitation, research-Art in complete.

IV. Growth and completion of art-Euphues and fashion-Style and spirit of the Renaissance-Copiousness and irregularity-How manners, style, and pirit correspond-Sir Philip Sydney-His education, life, character-His learning, gravity, generosity, forcible expression-The Arcadia-Exaggeration and mannerism of sentiments and style-Defence of Poesie-Eloquence and energy-His sonnets-Wherein the body and the passions of the

Renaissance differ from those of the moderns-Sensual love-Mystical love.

V. Pastoral poetry-The great number of poets-Spirit and force of the poetry -State of mind which produces it-Love of the country-Reappearance of the ancient gods-Enthusiasm for beauty-Picture of ingenuous and happy love-Shakspeare, Jonson, Fletcher, Drayton, Marlowe, Warner, Breton, Lodge, Greene-How the transformation of the people transforms art. VI. Ideal poetry-Spenser-His life-His character-Hís platonism-His Hymnɛ of Love and Beauty-Copiousness of his imagination-How far it was suited for the epic-Wherein it was allied to the 'faërie '-His tentatives-Shop · herd's Calendar-His short poems-His masterpiece-The Faërie Queene -His epic is allegorical and yet life-like-It embraces Christian chivalry and the Pagan Olympia-How it combines these.

VII. The Faërie Queene-Impossible events-How they appear natural-Belphœbe and Chrysogone-Fairy and gigantic pictures and landscapes-Why they must be so-The cave of Mammon, and the gardens of Acrasia-How Spenser composes-Wherein the art of the Renaissance is complete.

3. PROSE.

I. Limit of the poetry-Changes in society and manners-How the return to nature becomes an appeal to the senses- -Corresponding changes in poetry -How agreeableness replaces energy-How prettiness replaces the beautiful -Refinements-Carew, Suckling, Herrick-Affectation-Quarles, Herbert, Babington, Donne, Cowley-Beginning of the classic style, and the draw. ing-room life.

II. How poetry passed into prose-Connection of science and art-In Italy-In England-How the triumph of nature develops the exercise of the natural reason-Scholars, historians, speakers, compilers, politicians, antiquarians, philosophers, theologians-The abundance of talent, and the rarity of fine works - Superfluousness, punctiliousness, and pedantry of the style — Originality, precision, energy, and richness of the style-How, unlike the classical writers, they represent the individual, not the idea.

III. Robert Burton-His life and character-Vastness and confusion of his acquirements-His subject, the Anatomy of Melancholy-Scholastic divisions -Medley of moral and medical science.

IV. Sir Thomas Browne-His talent-His imagination is that of a North-manHydriotaphia, Religio Medici-His ideas, curiosity, and doubts belong to the age of the Renaissance — Pseudodoxia — Effects of this activity and this direction of the public mind.

V. Francis Bacon-His talent-His originality-Concentration and brightness of his style-Comparisons and aphorisms-The Essays-His style not argumentative, but intuitive-His practical good sense-Turning-point of his philosophy-The object of science is the amelioration of the condition of man-New Atlantis-The idea is in accordance with the state of affairs and the spirit of the times-It completes the Renaissance-It introduces new method-The Organum-Where Bacon stopped-Limits of the spirit of the age-How the conception of the world, which had been poetic, became mechanical-How the Renaissance ended in the establishment of positive science.

FOR

1. MANNERS OF THE TIME

I.

NOR seventeen centuries a deep and sad thought had weighed upon the spirit of man, first to overwhelm it, then to exalt and to weaken it, never loosing its hold throughout this long space of time. It was the idea of the impotence and decadence of man. Greek corruption, Roman oppression, and the dissolution of the old world, had given it birth; it, in its turn, had produced a stoical resignation, an epicurean indifference, Alexandrian mysticism, and the Christian hope in the kingdom of God. 'The world is evil and lost, let us escape by insensibility, amazement, ecstasy.' Thus spoke the philosophers; and religion, coming after, announced that the end was near: 'Prepare, for the kingdom of God is at hand.' For a thousand years universal ruin incessantly drove still deeper into their hearts this gloomy thought; and when man in the feudal state raised himself, by sheer force of courage and arms, from the depths of final imbecility and general misery, he discovered his thought and his work fettered by the crushing idea, which, forbidding a life of nature and worldly hopes, erected into ideals the obedience of the monk and the dreams of fanatics.

It degenerated of itself. For the natural result of such a conception, as of the miseries which engender it, and the discouragement which it gives rises to, is to paralyse personal action, and to replace originality by submission. From the fourth century, gradually the dead letter was substituted for the living faith. Christians resigned. themselves into the hands of the clergy, they into the hands of the Pope. Christian opinions were subordinated to theologians, and theologians to the Fathers. Christian faith was reduced to the accomplishment of works, and works to the accomplishment of ceremonies. Religion flowing during the first centuries, had become hardened and crystallised, and the coarse contact of the barbarians placed on it, in addition, a layer of idolatry: theocracy and the Inquisition manifested themselves, the monopoly of the clergy and the prohibition of the Scriptures, the worship of relics and the purchase of indulgences. In place of Christianity, the church; in place of free belief, an imposed orthodoxy; in place of moral fervour, determined religious practices; in place of heart and energetic thought, external and mechanical discipline: these are the characteristics of the middle-age. Under this constraint a thinking society had ceased to think; philosophy was turned into a textbook, and poetry into raving; and mankind, slothful and crouching, made over their conscience and their conduct into the hands of their priests, and were as puppets, capable only of reciting a catechism and chanting a hymn.1

See, at Bruges, the pictures of Hemling (fifteenth century). No painting enables us to understand so well the ecclesiastical piety of the middle age which was altogether like that of the Buddhists.