ts of princes and of populations.

IX.

Italy had already given so much of mental and social civilization to
Europe, that her quiescence at this epoch can scarcely supply a
substantial theme for rhetorical lamentations. Marino and Guido Reni
prove that the richer veins of Renaissance art and poetry had been
worked out. The lives of Aldus the younger and Muretus show that
humanism was well-nigh exhausted on its native soil. This will not,
however, prevent us from deploring the untimely frost cast by
persecution on Italy's budding boughs of knowledge. While we rejoice in
Galileo, we must needs shed tears of fiery wrath over the passion of
Campanella and the stake of Bruno. Meanwhile the tree of genius was ever
green and vital in that Saturnian land of culture. Poetry, painting,
sculpture, and architecture, having borne their flowers and fruits,
retired to rest. Scholarship faded; science was nipped in its unfolding
season by unkindly influences. But music put forth lusty shoots and
flourished, yielding a new paradise of harmless joy, which even priests
could grudge not to the world, and which lulled tyranny to sleep with
silvery numbers.

Thanks be to God that I who pen these pages, and that you who read them,
have before us in this year of grace the spectacle of a resuscitated
Italy! In this last quarter of the nineteenth century, the work of her
heroes, Vittorio Emmanuele, Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Cavour, stands
firmly founded. The creation of united Italy, that latest birth of the
Italian genius, that most impossible of dreamed-of triumphs through long
ages of her glory and greatness, compensates for all that she has borne
in these three hundred years. Now that Rome is no longer the seat of a
cosmopolitan theocracy, but the capital of a regenerated people; now
that Venice joins hands with Genoa, forgetful of Curzola and Chioggia;
now that Florence and Pisa and Siena stand like sisters on the sacred
Tuscan soil, while Milan has no strife with Naples, and the Alps and
sea-waves gird one harmony of cities who have drowned their ancient
spites in amity,--the student of the splendid and the bitter past may
pause and bow his head in gratitude to Heaven and swear that, after all,
all things are well.

X.

There is no finality in human history. It is folly to believe that any
religions, any social orders, any scientific hypotheses, are more than
provisional, and partially possessed of truth. Let us assume that the
wh