ed with nothing
but personages belonging to popular tradition, mythology, or allegory;
and in the fifteenth century this mythology was in full course of decay;
all that it might have commanded of credence or influence had vanished;
there remained of it nothing but barren memories or a contemptuous
incredulity. Speaking from the religious point of view, the Renaissance
was but a resurrection of paganism dying out before the presence of the
Christian world, which was troubled and perplexed, but full of life and
futurity.

The religious question thus set on one side, the Renaissance was a great
and happy thing, which restored to light and honor the works and glories
of the Greek and Roman communities, those two communities which, in
history anterior to the sixteenth century, had reached the greatest
prosperity and splendor under a civil regimen, in the midst of a more or
less stormy but real and strong political freedom, and had attained by
the mere development of human thought and human energy the highest degree
of civilization yet known in Europe, and, one would be inclined to say,
in the world. The memorials and monuments of this civilization, which
were suddenly removed, at the fall of the Greek empire, to Italy first
and then from Italy to France, and throughout the whole of Western
Europe, impressed with just admiration people as well as princes, and
inspired them with the desire of marching forward in their turn in this
attractive and glorious career. This kind of progress, arrived at by the
road of imitation, often costs dear in the interruption it causes to the
natural course of the peculiar and original genius of nations; but this
is the price at which the destinies of diverse communities get linked
together and interpenetrate, and the general progress of humanity is
accomplished.

It was not only in religious questions and by their philosopho-
theologians that the middle ages, before the Renaissance, displayed their
activity and fecundity. In literature and in art, in history and in
poesy, in architecture and in sculpture, they had produced great and
beautiful works, which were quite worthy of surviving, and have, in fact,
survived the period of their creation. Here, too, the Renaissance of
Greek and Roman antiquity came in, and altered the originality of the
earliest productions of the middle ages, and gave to literature and to
art in France a new direction. It will be made a point here to note with
som