promises of this æsthetic ideal, even when working on so unusual a nature as Marius's, interrogatively. Marius's life does not set it forth with convincing power. For one thing, it is not a vital life, but a painted one; and there is an inconsequence in the series of pictures, - they do not seem to follow one another by any iron necessity. It would be foolish to complain that a life avowedly only receptive and contemplative of the beautiful is inactive. Marius does nothing except at the end. Yet, within such limits, one never sees how beauty affected Marius or developed his soul, and though he is said to have got much from companionship, one sees love operant in him very seldom, and then it is a very silent and unexpressed love. He repeats his own epitaph, — tristem neminem fecit, and it was true; but all his life seems negative, and continually one asks, How did he really live? and gets no His whole life was a meditatio

answer.

mortis, - that is all that is told us.

A sense of failure, or rather of incompleteness, oppresses one at the end of the narrative. Even granting that the success Marius is said to have achieved one is never

quite sure that he did by that exquisite

appreciation of beauty and impassioned contemplation of its ideal forms, was, in fact, his; yet of what worth was it, what did it mean to either God or man? The Northern idealist, the Puritan, cannot dispense with some serviceableness as essential to any high living. One should not push the point too far, however. Independently of all that has been said, any one who cares to think on counsels of perfection for man's life will find profound and original thought about the ideal elements still at hand in modern days for use, and many wise reflections, sown in this history. It is a rare work, and not carelessly to be read. Some exquisiteness of taste, some delight in scholarship, some knowledge of what is best worth knowing in the historic expressions of man's aspiration, and, above all, that "inward tacitness of mind" the reader must bring to its perusal. What of it? Have we not the highest authority for casting our pearls where Circe's herd cannot come?

IV. ITALIAN RENAISSANCE LITERATURE.

The traditional romance that hangs about Italy has fostered a popular misapprehension of nearly all things Italian. As the mother

of Christian art and the Catholic Church, the land is supposed to be religious; as the long-enslaved and last-freed of the nations of Europe, the race is believed to be deficient in political sagacity. Yet it requires but little reflection, hardly more than a thought of the Reformation, to prevent surprise at the fact that the Italians were at heart the most irreligious of Christian peoples, and that the Church, viewed by them always as a secular institution, is a monument of their genius applied to practical affairs. Italian art, too, as an expression of national life, must be ascribed less to piety than to the native bent of mind, the inbred race disposition, which seeks to bring all spiritual things within the perception of the senses; indeed, the course of development in Italian art lies principally in the gradual substitution of an æsthetic aim for a devout motive as the source of inspiration. No people is less dreamy, in the Northern sense; the genius of the race is positive, definite, objective, practical, circumscribed in the tangible and visible facts of experience. Between Italian intellect and Italian feeling there seems to be no border-land. Ecstasy may fall from heaven and kindle masses of

men into passion, as in the case of the Flagellanti, but it is a malady of emotion only; the madness passes, the mind remains untouched. In Dante's poem, as has been often pointed out, these race qualities are clearly apparent: the journey is mapped out as on a chart; the hours are duly reckoned; the world beyond is laid open to accurate observation; the dark places of his Comedy are not dark with the spirit's excess of light, but with medieval metaphysics. In later authors, however different the subject, the temper of mind is the same. The grasp on reality is no less tenacious, the attention to detail no less careful; the incidents of the adventure, the look of the landscape, the physiognomy of the characters, no less plainly defined as phenomena ocularly seen.

In the poems of chivalry, whether romantic, heroic, or burlesque, which seem to possess the characteristics of later Italian literature in most variety, this realism is veiled by the apparent unreality of the fable. Arthur and Roland belong to the North; and to the Northern mind itself, although they have the substance of ideals, they are very remote. But the Arthur of Italian nobles, the Roland of the Italian people, are the

thinnest of shades; nor were they less insubstantial to most of the poets of the golden age than to us. The people gave the Carolingian myth to them as the burden of their stories; but, leaving Boiardo out of the account, they could not accept the conditions of that imaginative world and believe in it; nor could Boiardo, who had without doubt a real enthusiasm for chivalry, believe with Spenser's faith. Italy had no feudal past; how could the citizen Pulci feel any living sympathy with feudal ideals? The myth was emptied of its moral contents; how could Ariosto be earnest as Tennyson is? In dealing with deeds of knight-errantry, adventures in the lists and the forest, wizard springs and invincible armor, all the poets were conscious of something quixotic; to Ariosto it was the main element. He could not be serious; the mock gravity of irony was the most he could compass. This sense of unreality in the legend was not all that led the last poets of the age especially to play with their art. A more powerful reason was the hopelessness of society in their age, deep as that which in earlier times fell on their ancestors, who witnessed the barbarian incursions on Roman soil. Politically,