irrefragable "texts." Brilliant books have been produced in this way, we all know, and wonderful opportunities given to the politician and the partisan of promulgating their favourite views, and impressing at least the passive portion of the public with their favourite conception of historic truth. Such adaptations of history are often more exciting, more vivid, more living, as pervaded by the actual beliefs and sentiments of the writer, than more trustworthy works; yet it is disagreeable to feel no certainty after we have read, for example, the brilliant volumes of Lord Macaulay, that the greatest historical event or most notable character has not been subjected to some subtle modification or alteration, to suit his political views, or even, more disenchanting still, to answer the demands of chiaro-oscuro in his admirable style, by furnishing the due amount of light or of relief which that picturesque medium required. And it is painful when we turn to Mr Froude's interesting pages to be aware, through all the beauty of the narrative, of that curious half-conscious manipulation of facts to suit an impassioned preconception of character, which turns the historian's judicial calm into the fiery force of a partisan's argument. Mr Symonds is far from having attained the altitude of either Froude or Macaulay; and the period he has chosen is one which can scarcely move English readers, at least to anything of the same exciting interest which still clings to the names of Elizabeth and Mary, of Charles and Cromwell, or even of James and William-names which recall to us the great and long-standing duel which is still, by milder manifestations, going on among us, and in which it is still

impossible for British men not to take sides. The age of the Renaissance is further off, and its influence was never so much felt in our distant regions as to move us beyond the range of impartial interest. Mr Symonds, however, demonstrates to us the existence of a third danger beyond those of political or personal partiality. He is in love with his theory: the ordinary influences of humanity, the common sequence of events, disappear from before his eyes, and the Renaissance becomes all in all. Life stands still and steps aside; Religion abandons the field; even Vice, more potent, is superseded by this

new power. It is not natural wickedness that makes a monster of Alexander VI., but the Renaissance; and it is not outraged faith and prophetic zeal which move Savonarola, but again the Renaissance, an influence still less tangible than those other spiritual influences which have moved mankind through all the ages; but which, seen through Mr Symonds' eyes, appears almost like an individual-a tremendous mysterious personality, taking upon itself all spiritual functions both for good and evil. This is a great drawback to his book, which in itself gives an animated and able picture of a very interesting period. The motive is doubtless a better one than those of the historians to whom we have referred; the writer's intention is to give a new life and interest to his record, not by elevation of one side or one person, but by development of a new spiritual action and spring of intellectual motive, before which all the old principalities and powers abdicated, for the moment at least. But we fear these ancient potentates are too strong for Mr Symonds, and this sort

of spiritual personation (if we may be allowed the phrase) is not to be made in modern days. Religion we know, and wickedness we know, for these abstractions are as old as the world; but the imagination refuses to acknowledge Renaissance as a new ghostly power. The French have tried hard to establish Revolution as one of the spiritual potencies, not a fact or a series of facts, but a mystery and influence like truth or falsehood, war or peace; but though in France itself the attempt has been partially successful, we cannot allow our vague Olympus of abstractions to be thus tampered with in the nineteenth century. In art, in literature, in science, no doubt, the results of the Renaissance are sufficiently marked to be distinguishable as individual phenomena; but we fear Mr Symonds oversteps the mark when he makes the influence of this period equally potential in history and morals taking the sceptre out of the hands of those old Thrones and Dominations which existed before the Renaissance and after, and sway us still.

With this protestation, however, to begin with, the reader will find a very lively picture of an extremely interesting age in Mr Symonds' big volume lively and interesting at once because of its goodness and its badness, the amount of study and research evident in it, and the curious breakneck falls down precipices of fine writing, with which much that is very good both in style and feeling is interlarded. Mr Symonds belongs to a new school of writers of the class which would have been styled "elegant" a century ago, which has been produced by a new and small Renaissance of its own quite recently accomplished-so that his downfalls in this kind call for more notice than were they merely the

natural trippings-up in the haste of his career of a young and comparatively unpractised author. That young men should feel it in their power to throw an entirely new light over the antiquated old world, in which we too once were young and entertained the same delusion, is not only natural but desirable and attractive to the reader, who, if he is at all an amiable reader, likes nothing better than to share when he can the delightful surprise with which every new beholder sheds a novel glory upon the universe. But young writers entertaining this lofty hope, and dotting their pages with Greek quotations, which show that they aspire to the very highest and most cultured audience, and scorn all unclassical readers, women, and simple folks, should be very careful of committing themselves to rhetoric, or outbursts of graphic eloquence in the manner of Mr Hepworth Dixon. Sad it is to say it, but duty compels us to point out that this is what Mr Symonds has done, though he ought to know a great deal better. If the gentleman we have just named (with the greatest respect for where could a more popular writer be found?) should undertake (and why should he not?) a history of His Holiness's Palace' as he has done that of 'Her Majesty's Tower,' we do not know that even his experienced hand could produce a tableau more splendid than the following, which we quote from the chapter entitled the "Popes of the Renaissance," from Mr Symonds' book :—

"When our Elizabethan ancestors were about to act a History upon the stage, they used first to send in dumbshow across the scene a representative pageant of the chief personages. Let us imagine that we are assisting at such a spectacle. The Popes of the Renaissance defile before us in a figurative procession. Upon a stallion gorgeously caparisoned first rides a grand man in

first chapter he explains his conception of the Renaissance as follows:

"If we ask the students of Art what they mean by the Renaissance, they will reply that it was the revolution effected in architecture, painting, and sculpture by the recovery of ancient monuments. Students of literature, philosophy, and theology see in the Renaissance that discovery of manuscripts, that passion for antiquity, that progress in philosophy and criticism, which led to a correct knowledge of the classics, to a fresh taste in poetry, to new systems of thought, to more accurate analysis, and finally to the Lutheran schism, and the emancipation of the conscience. Men of science will discourse about the discovery of the solar system by Copernicus and Galileo, the anatomy of Vesalius, and Harvey's theory of the circulation of the blood. The origination of a truly scientific method is the point which interests them most in the Renaissance. The political historian, again, has his own answer to the question. The extinction of feudalism, the development of the great nationalities of Europe, the growth of monarchy, the limitation of the ecclesiastical authority, and the erection of the Papacy into an Italian kingdom, and, in the last place, the gradual emergence of that sense of popular freedom which exploded in the Revolution: these are the aspects of the movement which engross his attention. Jurists will describe the dissolution of legal fictions based upon the false decretals, the acquisition of a true text of the Roman code, and the attempt to introduce a rational method into the theory of modern jurisprudence, as well as to commence the study of international law. Men whose attention has been turned to the history of discoveries and inventions, will relate the exploration of America and the East, or will point to the benefits conferred upon the world by the arts of printing and engraving, by the compass and the telescope, by paper and by gunpowder; and will insist that at the moment of the Renais

sance all the instruments of mechanical utility started into existence, to aid the dissolution of what was rotten and must perish, to strengthen and perpetuate the new and useful and life

giving. Yet neither any one of these answers taken separately, nor, indeed, all of them together, will offer a solution of the problem. By the term Renaissance, or new birth, is indicated a restored movement not to be ex

plained by this or that characteristic, but to be accepted as an effort of humanity, for which at length the time had come, and in the onward progress of which we still participate. The history of the Renaissance is not the history of arts, or of science, or of literature, or even of nations. It is the history of the attainment of selfconscious freedom by the human spirit manifested in the European races. is no mere political initiation, no new fashion of art, no restoration of classical standards of taste. The arts and the inventions, the knowledge and the books, which suddenly became vital at the time of the Renaissance, had long lain neglected on the shores of

It

that Dead Sea which we call the

Middle Ages. It was not their discovery

which caused the Renaissance: But it was the intellectual energy, the spontaneous outburst of intelligence which enabled mankind at that moment to make use of them. The force thus generated still continues vital and expansive in the spirit of the modern

world."

Thus the reader will perceive Mr Symonds' view of the Renaissance is infinitely more extended than the general meaning given to the word, the rebirth of classical lore and classical art in a barbarian world. It is wide-and at the same time it is narrow; for everything that has happened since, all the developments of the centuries, seem to him to have found their root in this great birthperiod. That great waves of energy and genius do come by times suddenly, and out of all reckoning, to rouse and quicken the world into more strenuous living, there can be no doubt, and that the period commonly called the Renaissance was one of those high tides of force and power; but at the same time it ought not to be forgotten that, in the very country which has felt the influence of the Re

naissance most, in Italy herself, the two first and greatest of her poets, the men who established her language, and founded her literature, were before the Renaissance. No writer who has come after him has done half so much for Italy as Dante, and his work is entirely beyond and outside of the period of the so-called new birth. Even to refer to Mr Symonds' special work, we can see no reason for regarding Lorenzo dei Medici as a "Despot" of a different character from Cane della Scala, who flourished nearly two centuries before him. Both were so far usurpers that they were liable to be "cacciato" at any moment, driven "fuori" like leaves upon the wind, as Lorenzo's son was, though not himself, and they had no recognised right of sovereignty over their respective cities; yet both were great princes, holding, each according to the fashion of his time, high court in the town which was his kingdom, his country, his slave and yet which no more belonged to him by any legal claim than it belonged to the jester at his table. Between the beginning of the fourteenth and the middle or end of the fifteenth century, a great many things had happened. Art had made prodigious progress, and riches had increased, and learning had grown to an altogether incalculable extent. Few pictures, we may believe, belonged to Can Grande, and fewer statues, and no Greek manuscripts at all; whereas the magnificent Lorenzo was great in all of these. But we are unable to find out what other characteristic difference there was between them, though Can Grande ruled Verona long before the Renaissance was thought of; and Lorenzo, according to Mr Symonds at least, was one of the typical despots of that period. Dante and his splendid patron both belong to "that Dead Sea which

we call the Middle Ages;" yet the favourite age of art, the darling of historical philosophy, the beginning of all culture and enlightenment, has not been able to produce such a pair as the author of the Divine Comedy and that prince to whom, canto by canto, the poem was submitted before it was given to vulgar eyes. This example takes away from the force of Mr Symonds' description. Lorenzo's poets were Politian and Pulci-men of a different calibre from him who at last found it so hard to mount the stairs of another and eat his salt and bitter bread.

This, however, is a digression. The vast tide of new life which Mr Symonds describes, and which, in one section of its power, he takes upon himself to expound in this volume, certainly produced at first a terrible and undesirable effect. If it expanded and liberated the intelligence, if it gave a new inspiration to art and a new stimulus to freedom, it gave at the same time a tremendous impulse to all the powers of tyranny, swelled to bursting the sluices of impurity and evil, and by the very heat and fervour of its rise, drove the world into a mad passion of ill-doing, which was as grotesque as, and more horrible than, any other revival; for that new energy which tingled through the being of Michael Angelo, and of the great prophet Savonarola himself, tingled likewise in all the veins of a vicious Pope, driving him into shameless exuberance and research of criminality, as it drove the others into passionate endeavours after perfection. Thus the first public effect of it (according to Mr Symonds himself) was an exhibition of the most complete and finished depravity, the most intolerable and cruel tyranny, which the world has ever seen. Before the revival had shown itself even on canvas or in marble,