by the greed of intellectual gain.
That which they thus instinctively knew that Italy possessed, that which
they must obtain, was a mode of thought, a habit of form; philosophy,
art, civilization: all the materials for intellectual manipulation. For,
in the sixteenth century, on awakening from its long evil sleep, haunted
by the nightmare of civil war, of the fifteenth century, the English
mind had started up in the vigour of well-nigh mature youth, fed up and
rested by the long inactivity in which it had slept through its period
of assimilation and growth. It had awakened at the first touch of
foreign influence, and had grown with every fresh contact with the outer
world: with the first glance at Plato and Xenophon suddenly opened by
Erasmus and Colet, at the Bible suddenly opened by Cranmer; it had grown
with its sob of indignation at the sight of the burning faggots
surrounding the martyrs, with its joyous heart-throbs at the sight of
the seas and islands of the New World; it had grown with the sudden
passionate strain of every nerve and every muscle when the galleys of
Philip had been sighted in the Channel. And when it had paused, taken
breath, and looked calmly around it, after the tumult of all these
sights and sounds and actions, the English mind, in the time of
Elizabeth, had found itself of a sudden full-grown and blossomed out
into superb manhood, with burning activities and indefatigable powers.
But it had found itself without materials for work. Of the scholastic
philosophy and the chivalric poetry of the Middle Ages there remained
but little that could be utilized: the few bungled formulae, the few
half-obsolete rhymes still remaining, were as unintelligible, in their
spirit of feudalism and monasticism and mysticism, as were the Angevin
English and the monkish Latin in which they were written to these men of
the sixteenth century. All the intellectual wealth of England remained
to be created; but it could not be created out of nothing. Spenser,
Shakespeare, and Bacon could not be produced out of the half-effete
and scattered fragments of Chaucer, of Scotus, and of Wycliffe. The
materials on which English genius was to work must be sought abroad, and
abroad they could be found only in Italy. For in the demolished Italy of
the sixteenth century lay the whole intellectual wealth of the world:
the great legacy of Antiquity, the great work of the Middle Ages had
been stored up, and had been increased threefold,