amount of colonizing among the vanquished can
ever produce the effect of a victorious army, of a whole nation,
suddenly finding itself in the midst of the superior civilization of a
conquered people. Michelet may well call the campaign of Charles VIII.
the discovery of Italy. His imaginative mind seized at once the vast
importance of this descent of the French into Italy, which other
historians have been too prone to view in the same light as any other
invasion. It is from this moment that dates the _modernisation_, if we
may so express ourselves, of the North. The barbarous soldiers of Gaston
de Foix, of Frundsberg, and of Gonsalvo, were the unconscious bearers of
the seeds of the ages of Elizabeth, of Louis XIV., and of Goethe. These
stupid and rapacious ruffians, while they wantonly destroyed the works
of Italian civilization, rendered possible the existence of a Montaigne,
a Shakespeare, and a Cervantes.

Italy was as a vast store-house, sheltered from all the dangers of
mediaeval destruction; in which, while all other nations were blindly and
fiercely working out their national existence, the inheritance of
Antiquity and the produce of the earliest modern civilization had been
peaceably garnered up. When the store-house was full, its gates had to
be torn open and its riches plundered and disseminated by the
intellectual starvelings of the North; thus only could the rest of
mankind feed on these riches, regain and develope their mental life.

What were those intellectual riches of the Renaissance? What was that
strong intellectual food which revived the energies and enriched the
blood of the Barbarians of the sixteenth century? The Renaissance
possessed the germs of every modern thing, and much that was far more
than a mere germ: it possessed the habit of equality before the law, of
civic organization, of industry and commerce developed to immense and
superb proportions. It possessed science, literature, and art; above
all, that which at once produced and was produced by all these--thorough
perception of what exists, thorough consciousness of our own freedom and
powers: self-cognizance. In Italy there was intellectual light, enabling
men to see and judge all around them, enabling them to act wittingly and
deliberately. In this lies the immense greatness of the Renaissance; to
this are due all its achievements in literature and science, and, above
all, in art: that, for the first time since the dissolution of antiqu