--by such princes as Sigismondo
Malatesta, Frederick of Urbino, or Alfonzo of Naples,--have made the
whole intelligent public believe that they were really as great as they
wished posterity to believe them.

As painting had done nothing whatever to transmit the glory of the great
Romans, the earlier generations of the Renaissance expected nothing from
it, and did not give it that patronage which the Church, for its own
purposes, continued to hold out to it. The Renaissance began to make
especial use of painting only when its own spirit had spread very
widely, and when the love of knowledge, of power, and of glory had
ceased to be the only recognised passions, and when, following the lead
of the Church, people began to turn to painting for the expression of
deep emotion. The new religion, as I have called the love of glory, is
in its very essence a thing of this world, founded as it is on human
esteem. The boundless curiosity of the Renaissance led back inevitably
to an interest in life and to an acceptance of things for what they
were,--for their intrinsic quality. The moment people stopped looking
fixedly toward heaven their eyes fell upon the earth, and they began to
see much on its surface that was pleasant. Their own faces and figures
must have struck them as surprisingly interesting, and, considering how
little St. Bernard and other mediaeval saints and doctors had led them to
expect, singularly beautiful. A new feeling arose that mere living was a
big part of life, and with it came a new passion, the passion for
beauty, for grace, and for comeliness.

It has already been suggested that the Renaissance was a period in the
history of modern Europe comparable to youth in the life of the
individual. It had all youth's love of finery and of play. The more
people were imbued with the new spirit, the more they loved pageants.
The pageant was an outlet for many of the dominant passions of the
time, for there a man could display all the finery he pleased, satisfy
his love of antiquity by masquerading as Caesar or Hannibal, his love of
knowledge by finding out how the Romans dressed and rode in triumph, his
love of glory by the display of wealth and skill in the management of
the ceremony, and, above all, his love of feeling himself alive. Solemn
writers have not disdained to describe to the minutest details many of
the pageants which they witnessed.

We have seen that the earlier elements of the Renaissance, the passion