sus et
ratio et angelica mens et Dei similitudo conspicitur.--"It is a
commonplace of the schools that man is a little world, in which we may
discern a body mingled of earthy elements, and ethereal breath, and the
vegetable life of plants, and the senses of the lower animals, and
reason, and the intelligence of angels, and a likeness to God."--A
commonplace of the schools! But perhaps it had some new significance and
authority, when men heard one like Pico reiterate it; and, false as its
basis was, the theory had its use. For this high dignity of man, thus
bringing the dust under his feet into sensible communion with the
thoughts and affections of the angels, was supposed to belong to him,
not as renewed by a religious system, but by his own natural right. The
proclamation of it was a counterpoise to the increasing tendency of
medieval religion to depreciate man's nature, to sacrifice this or that
element in it, to make it ashamed of itself, to keep the degrading or
painful accidents of it always in view. It helped man onward to that
reassertion of himself, that rehabilitation of human nature, the body,
the senses, the heart, the intelligence, which the Renaissance fulfils.
And yet to read a page of one of Pico's forgotten books is like a glance
into one of those ancient sepulchres, upon which the wanderer in
classical lands has sometimes stumbled, with the old disused ornaments
and furniture of a world wholly unlike ours still fresh in them. That
whole conception of nature is so different from our own. For Pico the
world is a limited place, bounded by actual crystal walls, and a
material firmament; it is like a painted toy, like that map or system of
the world, held, as a great target or shield, in the hands of the
grey-headed father of all things, in one of the earlier frescoes of the
Campo Santo at Pisa. How different from this childish dream is our own
conception of nature, with its unlimited space, its innumerable suns,
and the earth but a mote in the beam; how different the strange new awe,
or superstition, with which it fills our minds! "The silence of those
infinite spaces," says Pascal, contemplating a starlight night, "the
silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me"--Le silence eternel de
ces espaces infinis m'effraie.

He was already almost wearied out when he came to Florence. He had loved
much and been beloved by women, "wandering over the crooked hills of
delicious pleasure"; but their reign over him wa