rights. Nobody questioned the right of women to
learn as much as they could, where-ever anything was taught. There were
great ladies, good and bad, like Vittoria Colonna and Lucrezia Borgia,
who were scholars, and even Greek scholars, and probably equal to any
students of their time. Few ladies of Michelangelo's day did not know
Latin, and all were acquainted with such literature as there was--Dante,
Macchiavelli, Aretino, Ariosto and Petrarch,--for Tasso came later,--the
Tuscan minor poets, as well as the troubadours of Provence--not to
mention the many collections of tales, of which the scenes were destined
to become the subjects of paintings in the later days of the Renascence.

Modern society is the enemy of individuality, whether in dress, taste or
criticism, and the fear of seeming different from other people is
greater than the desire to rise higher than other people by purely
personal means. In the same way, socialism is the enemy of all personal
distinction, whatever the socialists may say to the contrary, and is
therefore opposed to all artistic development and in favour of all that
is wholesale, machine-made, and labour-saving. And nobody will venture
to say that modern tendencies are not distinctly socialistic.

[Illustration: INTERIOR OF SANTA MARIA DEGLI ANGELI

The Baths of Diocletian remodelled by Michelangelo]

We are almost at the opposite extreme of existence from the early
Renascence. That was the age of small principalities; ours is the day of
great nations. Anyone who will carefully read the history of the Middle
Age and of the Renascence will come to the inevitable conclusion that
the greatest artists and writers of today are very far from being the
rivals of those who were great then. Shakespeare was almost the
contemporary of Titian; there has been neither a Shakespeare nor a
Titian since, nor any writer nor artist in the most distant manner
approaching them. Yet go backward from them, and you will find Dante, as
great as Shakespeare, and at least three artists, Michelangelo, Lionardo
da Vinci and Raphael, quite as great as Titian. They lived in a society
which was antisocialistic, and they were the growth of a period in which
all the ideas of civilized mankind tended in a direction diametrically
opposed to that taken by our modern theories. This is undeniable. The
greatest artists, poets and literary men are developed where all
conditions most develop individuality. The modern state, in which