has made my studies of rustic poetry more clear or more
confused. But this much I know as a certainty, that never should I have
tried to unravel the causes of the Renaissance's horrible anomaly of
improvement and degradation, had not that anomaly returned and returned
to make me wretched with its loathsome mixture of good and evil; its
detestable alternative of endurance of vile solidarities in the souls of
our intellectual forefathers, or of unjust turning away from the men and
the times whose moral degradation paid the price of our moral dignity. I
also have the further certainty of its having been this long-endured
moral sickening at the sight of this moral anomaly, which enabled me to
realize the feelings of such of our nobler Elizabethan playwrights as
sought to epitomize in single tales of horror the strange impressions
left by the accomplished and infamous Italy of their day; and which made
it possible for me to express perhaps some of the trouble which filled
the mind of Webster and of Tourneur merely by expressing the trouble
which filled my own.

The following studies are not samples, fragments at which one tries
one's hand, of some large and methodical scheme of work. They are mere
impressions developed by means of study: not merely currents of thought
and feeling which I have singled out from the multifold life of the
Renaissance; but currents of thought and feeling in myself, which have
found and swept along with them certain items of Renaissance lore. For
the Renaissance has been to me, in the small measure in which it has
been anything, not so much a series of studies as a series of
impressions. I have not mastered the history and literature of the
Renaissance (first-hand or second-hand, perfectly or imperfectly),
abstract and exact, and then sought out the places and things which
could make that abstraction somewhat more concrete in my mind; I have
seen the concrete things, and what I might call the concrete realities
of thought and feeling left behind by the Renaissance, and then tried to
obtain from books some notion of the original shape and manner of
wearing these relics, rags and tatters of a past civilization.

For Italy, beggared and maimed (by her own unthrift, by the rapacity of
others, by the order of Fate) at the beginning of the sixteenth century,
was never able to weave for herself a new, a modern civilization, as did
the nations who had shattered her looms on which such woofs are made,
and