ween 1150 and 1225. In that period, so fruitful
of great efforts and of great results in the fields of politics and
thought and literature, efforts and results foredoomed to partial
frustration and to perverse misapplication--in that potent space of
time, so varied in its intellectual and social manifestations, so
pregnant with good and evil, so rapid in mutations, so indeterminate
between advance and retrogression--this Goliardic poetry stands
alone. It occupies a position of unique and isolated, if limited,
interest; because it was no outcome of feudalism or ecclesiasticism;
because it has no tincture of chivalrous or mystic piety; because it
implies no metaphysical determination; because it is pagan in the
sense of being natural; because it is devoid of allegory, and,
finally, because it is emphatically humanistic.

In these respects it detaches itself from the artistic and literary
phenomena of the century which gave it birth. In these respects it
anticipates the real eventual Renaissance.

There are, indeed, points of contact between the Students' Songs and
other products of the Middle Ages. Scholastic quibblings upon words;
reiterated commonplaces about spring; the brutal contempt for
villeins; the frequent employment of hymn-rhythms and preoccupation
with liturgical phrases--these show that the Wandering Scholars were
creatures of their age. But the qualities which this lyrical
literature shares with that of the court, the temple, or the schools
are mainly superficial; whereas the vital inspiration, the specific
flavour, which render it noteworthy, are distinct and self-evolved. It
is a premature, an unconscious effort made by a limited class to
achieve _per saltum_ what was slowly and laboriously wrought out by
whole nations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Too
precocious, too complete within too narrow limits, it was doomed to
sterility. Not the least singular fact about it is that though the
_Carmina Vagorum_ continued to be appreciated, they were neither
imitated nor developed to any definite extent after the period which I
have indicated. They fell still-born upon the unreceptive soil of
European culture at that epoch. Yet they foreshadowed the mental and
moral attitude which Europe was destined to assume when Italy through
humanism gave its tone to the Renaissance.

The Renaissance, in Italy as elsewhere, had far more serious aims and
enthusiasms in the direction of science, refined self-culture