ng on at the dissolution of moral and social
elements. And in this, that I have tried to understand only where my
curiosity was awakened, tried to reconstruct only where my fancy was
taken; in short, studied of this Renaissance civilization only as much
or as little as I cared, depends all the incompleteness and irrelevancy
and unsatisfactoriness of this book, and depends also whatever addition
to knowledge or pleasure it may afford; Were I desirous of giving a
complete, clear notion of the very complex civilization of the
Renaissance, a kind of encyclopaedic atlas of that period, where (by a
double power which history alone possesses) you could see at once the
whole extent and shape of this historical territory, and at the same
time, with all its bosses of mountain and furrows of valley, the exact
composition of all its various earths and waters, the exact actual
colour and shape of all its different vegetations, not to speak of its
big towns and dotting villages;--were I desirous of doing this, I should
not merely be attempting a work completely beyond my faculties, but a
work moreover already carried out with all the perfection due to
specially adapted gifts, to infinite patience and ingenuity,
occasionally amounting almost to genius. Such is not at all within my
wishes, as it assuredly would be totally without my powers.

But besides such marvels of historic mapping as I have described, where
every one can find at a glance whatever he may be looking for, and get
the whole topography, geological and botanical, of an historic tract at
his fingers' ends, there are yet other kinds of work which may be done.
For a period in history is like a more or less extended real landscape:
it has, if you will, actual, chemically defined colours in this and
that, if you consider this and that separate and unaffected by any kind
of visual medium; and measurable distances also between this point and
the other, if you look down upon it as from a balloon. But, like a real
landscape, it may also be seen from different points of view, and under
different lights; then, according as you stand, the features of the
scene will group themselves--this ridge will disappear behind that, this
valley will open out before you, that other will be closed. Similarly,
according to the light wherein the landscape is seen, the relative scale
of colours and tints of objects, due to pervading light and to
distances--what painters call the values--will alter: