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All the same I shall endeavour to tell you why I agree with poor Condorcet when he expressed his firm faith in a better future. Often before have I warned you against the false impression which is created by the use of our so-called historical epochs which divide the story of man into four parts, the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Reformation, and Modern Time.
By quietly watching the elections and secretly controlling the selection of city officials, they governed without letting it be suspected that the people had lost their power. As one wanders about Florence to-day, he is impressed with the contradictions of the Renaissance period.
The final conditions became fantastic and effeminate, but, in the country where they had been invented, never lost their peculiar grace until they were replaced by the Renaissance.
To the west are two towers, built between the years 1641 and 1671, and on the south a very fine renaissance cloister of two stories, the lower having been built, it is said, in 1524, and the upper about 1730. A choir gallery too, with an elaborate Gothic vault below and a fine renaissance balustrade, crosses the whole west end and extends over the porch between the two western towers.
The Renaissance, or what remained of it, was now no longer confined to Italy; it had spread, paler, more diluted, shallower, over the rest of Europe. To follow the filiation of schools, to understand the intellectual relationships of individuals, of the latter half of the sixteenth century, it becomes necessary to move from one country to another.
Whether the architect deliberately aimed at the sublime or graceful whether the dignified serenity of the Athenian genius sought to express itself in the Parthenon, and the mysticism of mediæval Christianity in the gloom of Chartres Cathedral whether it was Renaissance paganism which gave its mundane pomp and glory to S. Peter's, and the refined selfishness of royalty its specious splendour to the palace of Versailles need not be curiously questioned.
The last half of the letter was painfully disconcerting. Two whole pages were devoted to an explanation of the writer's wish to spend some time in the west of Ireland. Theophilus Lovaway had managed, in the middle of his professional reading, to study the literature of the Irish Renaissance. He had fallen deeply in love with the spirit of the Celtic peasantry.
Similar use may be made of vari-coloured silks in couching white or other cord; but gold reflects the colour much better than silk, and gives much more subtle effects. The Flemings and Italians of the early Renaissance went further. They had a way of laying threads of gold and sewing them so closely over with coloured silk that in many parts it quite hid the gold.
The whole Renaissance cherished that wish of reposeful, blithe, and yet serious intercourse of good and wise friends in the cool shade of a house under trees, where serenity and harmony would dwell. The age yearned for the realization of simplicity, sincerity, truth and nature.
All of these epochs fall within the limits of the Renaissance, and all, except that of Petrarch, within the later Renaissance which we are now considering. The period is therefore worth careful study. Gutenberg's invention had no immediate effect upon his world.
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