Amid the universal ruin the traditions of municipal order were preserved, and formed the basis of the new civilisation. Rising on the remains of their ancient foundations, fortified by the prestige of Rome, now the centre of Christianity, but still the repository of the great memories of the past, the cities of Italy rebuilt their walls, trained a civic militia, and successfully defended their liberties, by united league, alike against their barbarous feudal neighbours and their German over-lord. As they advanced in prosperity they began, like their Greek predecessors, to adorn life with the arts of expression. But the forms that they employed resembled only in their essence of liberty those of the free Greeks of antiquity, and were modified by all the historic transmutations which the human spirit had since experienced. The degenerate tradition of Hellenic art had indeed, during the barbarous ages, passed from Byzantium to Venice, to the cities of the Western Coast of Italy, and even to Rome itself, but it had been adapted to suit the new requirements of Christianity, and the impulses of free invention in the now mixed races of Latins, Goths, and Lombards. The old Roman basilica had changed into the Christian Church, and on apse or triforium were represented images of the new religion as vivid, though not of course as beautiful, as the sculptures on the frieze of the Parthenon. To the nations of the north, Byzanto-Gothic, Lombardo-Roman, Norman-Arab modifications of ancient civil and religious architecture were being constantly carried, there to be developed into new forms of beauty and sublimity. In all the cities of Europe, whose defensive walls still indicated the presence of barbarous neighbours, municipal halls and market-houses, half-feudal, half-ecclesiastical in their structure, testified to the advance of commerce and civilisation. New languages, formed out of the decay of Latin and the changing speech of the Teutonic invaders, had reached a point of refinement at which it was possible to use them as vehicles for general ideas; and already the Divine Comedy and the Decameron in Italy, the Romance of the Rose in France, and The Canterbury Tales in England, marked the characteristic divergencies of thought amongst the infant nations of modern Europe. Hence, long before the era of the Classical Renaissance, properly so called, an early Civic Renaissance had, by the natural operation of free institutions, created, amidst feudal and ecclesiastical surroundings, independent societies, whether in the form of city states, or of nations, each with an intellectual character of its own, formed, without reference to the old Hellenic canons, out of Roman traditions of art and such literary models as had been preserved in the encyclopædic education of the Church Schools,1 After 1453, however, the Revival of Ancient Learning began to operate on these communities. By the light of recovered MSS. men were enabled to acquaint themselves directly with the free civic spirit animating the monuments of classic antiquity, and to use Greek and Roman art for the purposes either of original invention or of submissive imitation. Whether that reproduction was free or servile depended on the political character of the particular society within which the Renaissance worked. This effect is so uniform and so strongly marked that it can be described with precision. As regards the spirit of the Classical Renaissance : wherever it operated on a community in which the love of liberty was strongly developed, there the ancient civic spirit combined readily with modern ideas, and the effect was to stimulate, and at the same time to refine, artistic invention. Wherever, on the contrary, the civic spirit had made only a little way against a predominant Ecclesiasticism and Feudalism, there the Classical Renaissance failed to strike deep root or greatly to modify the mediaval character of thought and expression. As regards the Renaissance of Greek form: in proportion as the spirit of civic freedom was strong in any society, the effect of the Revival of Learning was to encourage the use of classical models for criticising and correcting, without supplanting, the forms of the early and spontaneous national art. 1 Vol. i. pp. 24-26, and pp. 161-162. But in proportion as the spirit of liberty decayed in any modern society, the Classical Renaissance either encouraged imaginative anarchy, or caused Greek and Roman forms, pure and simple, to supersede the mixed forms which had been invented by the free energy of national character. In order to follow the course of poetical development in the present volume, it will first be necessary to revert, in a brief retrospect, to the working of these principles on the rising poetry of Italy, France, and England. The poetry of Spain and Germany need not at present detain our attention, because, in the former country, the civic spirit, suppressed by the Inquisition in alliance with Absolutism, made but little advance; while, in the latter, the anarchical forces of Feudalism and religious war prevented the establishment of anything like civil self-government. But in the three other countries the effects of the Classical Renaissance on the art of poetry are most various and instructive, and in Italy particularly, which took the lead in modern European civilisation, and where the conditions of life most nearly resembled those of the ancient Greek States, the evolution of the forces I have mentioned presents phenomena of striking regularity. The intimate connection between the life of the Greek city and the life of Greek art and criticism has been thus suggestively pointed out by an eminent English scholar : In the poetical schools of Greece reflection had been at work and discussion rife for centuries before the Periclean era. Literary forms or types were created-epic, lyric, dramatic, elegiacwhich have stood the test of time and become the accepted models of the Western world. Behind the activity of creative genius a ceaseless critical effort was at work controlling and inspiring poetic invention. Standards of writing were formed, canons of taste laid down, and the great problem of reconciling tradition with freedom of development was in process of solution. Meanwhile the variations of literary type answered to the living forces operating in society. The poets followed close upon the movements of the race and the people. Their "invention," their originality, consisted chiefly in vitalising old material, in interpreting the legends in the light of the present, in recreating and ever renewing the marvellous history of the past. To make old things seem new and new things seem familiar was one main function of their art.1 Precisely on the same lines of spontaneous civic development was laid the structure of poetical form and diction in mediæval Italy. Dante (1265-1321), for example, declares that what he calls the "Illustrious Vulgar Tongue" must be grounded on a selection, by the best writers, of words used in the various spoken dialects of Italy. Just as a Vulgar Tongue (says he, in his scholastic manner) is to be found belonging to Cremona, so can one be found belonging to Lombardy; and just as one can be found belonging to Lombardy, so one can be found belonging to the whole of the left side of Italy. And just as all these can be found, so also can that be found which belongs to the whole of Italy. And just as the first is called Cremonese, the second Lombard, and the third semi-Italian, so that which belongs to the whole of Italy is called the Italian Vulgar Tongue. For this has been used by the illustrious writers who have written poetry in the vernacular throughout Italy.2 3 As to the thoughts which are expressed in this Illustrious Vulgar Tongue, we find in the Divine Comedy the strangest mixture of images, partly borrowed from the Scriptures or from the Latin authors whose works are allowed by the Church to be studied, and partly derived from actual life in the cities of Italy. In the Inferno, for example, Farinata degli Uberti and Ciacco,* of Florence, appear in the same region with Minos, Geryon, the Minotaur, and Chiron; while, even in the Purgatorio, the names of Niobe, Arachne, and Alcmæon are impartially mixed with those of Nimrod, Rehoboam, and Sennacherib. In the same spirit the commentator Lombardi, as late as the eighteenth century, blames Dante's interpreters for ascribing to Hercules, instead of to the Saviour, the exploit of binding Cerberus!" Such were the "Gothic and 1 Harvard Lectures on Greek Subjects, by S. H. Butcher, pp. 171-172. 2 Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, book i. chap. xxx. Translation by A. G. F. Howell. 3 Inferno, Canto x. 4 Ib. Canto vi. 5 Purgatorio, Canto xii. 6 Inferno, Canto ix. pp. 98-99. Note of P. Bonaventura Lombardi (1791). monkish foundations "-to use the phrase of Burke-on which arose the structure of the early civilisation of Italy. Passing from the work of Dante to the work of Ariosto (1474-1533), we breathe a changed atmosphere. The Classical has supervened on the Civic Renaissance. Dante wrote when the cities of Italy still enjoyed their ancient liberties. Even in the beginning of the sixteenth century Italy was far from having abandoned all aspirations for the greatness of that golden past. No doubt the time was close at hand when the armies of France, Spain, and Germany, would cross the sea or the Alps to do battle with each other for her fairest provinces; no doubt the Popes had turned from their high spiritual ambitions to the lust of temporal and territorial sway. Still the memories of the great days of the Lombard League survived, and men of action, like Machiavelli, could dream of freeing the soil of Italy from foreign usurpation by the enrolment of a civic militia. With the usual clairvoyance of his countrymen, Ariosto understood the decadence of liberty and morals in the Republics of Italy, but he contrived, even in an age of despots, to preserve that feeling of personal dignity and independence-characteristic of the best kind of Humanism-which he expressed in the inscription on his house at Ferrara : Parva, sed apta mihi, sed nulli obnoxia, sed non And the same feeling of refined simplicity animates his poetical style. He writes in the conversational idiom of the Illustrious Vulgar Tongue, as it has come down to him from his predecessors, Pulci and Boiardo. Though there is no appearance of effort or strangeness in his diction, we know that, in fact, each of his stanzas was polished with the most studious pains. His language is that neither of the Schoolman nor of the unsophisticated citizen, but of the Courtier; the audience he addresses is the group of ladies and gentlemen, gathered every evening in the Duke of Ferrara's palace, to listen, with an understanding smile, to the poet's gravely ironic recitation of |