a microscope of modern focus. They appear monstrous
and abnormal, and we straight-way assume them to be monsters and
abnormalities, never considering that the fault is in the adjustment
of the instrument through which we inspect them, and that until that is
corrected others of that same past age, if similarly viewed, must appear
similarly distorted.

Hence it follows that some study of an age must ever prelude and
accompany the study of its individuals, if comprehension is to wait upon
our labours. To proceed otherwise is to judge an individual Hottentot or
South Sea Islander by the code of manners that obtains in Belgravia or
Mayfair.

Mind being the seat of the soul, and literature being the expression of
the mind, literature, it follows, is the soul of an age, the surviving
and immortal part of it; and in the literature of the Cinquecento you
shall behold for the looking the ardent, unmoral, naive soul of this
Renaissance that was sprawling in its lusty, naked infancy and bellowing
hungrily for the pap of knowledge, and for other things. You shall
infer something of the passionate mettle of this infant: his
tempestuous mirth, his fierce rages, his simplicity, his naivete, his
inquisitiveness, his cunning, his deceit, his cruelty, his love of
sunshine and bright gewgaws.

To realize him as he was, you need but to bethink you that this was
the age in which the Decamerone of Giovanni Boccaccio, the Facetiae of
Poggio, the Satires of Filelfo, and the Hermaphroditus of Panormitano
afforded reading-matter to both sexes. This was the age in which the
learned and erudite Lorenzo Valla--of whom more anon--wrote his famous
indictment of virginity, condemning it as against nature with arguments
of a most insidious logic. This was the age in which Casa, Archbishop
of Benevento, wrote a most singular work of erotic philosophy, which,
coming from a churchman's pen, will leave you cold with horror should
you chance to turn its pages. This was the age of the Discovery of Man;
the pagan age which stripped Christ of His divinity to bestow it upon
Plato, so that Marsilio Ficino actually burnt an altar-lamp before an
image of the Greek by whose teachings--in common with so many scholars
of his day--he sought to inform himself.

It was an age that had become unable to discriminate between the merits
of the Saints of the Church and the Harlots of the Town. Therefore it
honoured both alike, extolled the carnal merits of the one in muc