ce, that the sacrifice which it
represents could be useful only in so far as it was complete and
irretrievable. Let us remember that the communal system of government,
on whose development the Renaissance mainly depended, inevitably
perished in proportion as it developed; that the absolute subjugation of
Italy by Barbarous nations was requisite to the dissemination of the
civilization thus obtained; that the Italians were politically
annihilated before they had time to recover a normal condition, and were
given up crushed and broken spirited, to be taught righteousness by
Spaniards and Jesuits. That, in short, while the morality of the
Italians was sacrificed to obtain the knowledge on which modern society
depends, the political existence of Italy was sacrificed to the
diffusion of that knowledge, and that the nation was not only doomed to
immorality, but doomed also to the inability to reform. Perhaps, if we
think of all this, and weigh the tremendous sacrifice to which we owe
our present intellectual advantages, we may still feel sad, but sad
rather with remorse than with indignation, in contemplating the
condition of Italy in the first years of the sixteenth century; in
looking down from our calm, safe, scientific position, on the murder of
the Italian Renaissance: great and noble at heart, cut off pitilessly at
its prime; denied even an hour to repent and amend; hurried off before
the tribunal of posterity, suddenly, unexpectedly, and still bearing its
weight of unexpiated, unrecognized guilt.

THE ITALY OF THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.

I.

The chroniclers of the last years of the fifteenth century have recorded
how the soldiery of Charles VIII. of France amused the tedious leisure
of their sullen and suspicious occupation of Rome, by erecting in the
camp a stage of planks, and performing thereon a rude mystery-play. The
play thus improvised by a handful of troopers before this motley
invading army: before the feudal cavalry of Burgundy, strange steel
monsters, half bird, half reptile, with steel beaked and winged helmets
and claw-like steel shoes, and jointed steel corselet and rustling steel
mail coat; before the infantry of Gascony, rapid and rapacious with
their tattered doublets and rag-bound feet; before the over-fed,
immensely plumed, and slashed and furbelowed giants of Switzerland, and
the starved, half-naked savages of Brittany and the Marches--before this
multifaced, many-speeched army, gathered