brought about a high degree of
cosmopolitanism, especially among those who were banished. 'My
country is the whole world,' said Dante; and Ghiberti: 'Only he who
has learned everything is nowhere a stranger; robbed of his fortune
and without friends, he is yet a citizen of every country, and can
fearlessly despise the changes of fortune.'

In both Hellenism and the Renaissance, an effort was made in art and
science to see things as they really were. In art, detail was
industriously cultivated; but its naturalism, especially as to
undraped figures, was due to a sensuous refinement of gallantry and
erotic feeling. The sensuous flourished no less in Greek times than
in those of Boccaccio; but the most characteristic peculiarity of
Hellenism was its intentional revelling in feeling--its
sentimentality. There was a trace of melancholy upon many faces of
the time, and unhappy love in endless variations was the poet's main
theme. Petrarch's lyre was tuned to the same key; a melancholy
delight in grief was the constant burden of his song.

In Greece the sight of foreign lands had furthered the natural
sciences, especially geography, astronomy, zoology, and botany; and
the striving for universality at the Renaissance, which was as much a
part of its individualism as its passion for fame, was aided by the
widening of the physical and mental horizons through the Crusades and
voyages of discovery. Dante was not only the greatest poet of his
time, but an astronomer; Petrarch was geographer and cartographer,
and, at the end of the fifteenth century, with Paolo Toscanelli,
Lucca Baccioli, and Leonardo da Vinci, Italy was beyond all
comparison the first nation in Europe in mathematics and natural
science.

A significant proof of the wide-spread interest in natural
history is found in the zeal which shewed itself at an early
period for the collection and comparative study of plants and
animals. Italy claims to be the first creator of botanical
gardens.... princes and wealthy men, in laying out their pleasure
gardens, instinctively made a point of collecting the greatest
possible number of different plants in all their species and
varieties. (BURCKHARDT.)

Leon Battista Alberti, a man of wide theoretical knowledge as well as
technical and artistic facility of all sorts, entered into the whole
life around him with a sympathetic intensity that might almost be
called nervous.

At the sight of nobl