ot a mere
chronological period, but a definite social and mental condition)
fortunately did not exist everywhere. Had they existed, it is almost
impossible to understand how they would ever throughout Europe have come
to an end; for as the favourite proverb of Catharine of Siena has it,
one dead man cannot bury another dead man; and the Middle Ages, after
this tedious dying of the fifteenth century, required to be shovelled
into the tomb, nay, rather, given the final stroke, by the Renaissance.
This that we foolishly call--giving a quite incorrect notion of sudden
and miraculous birth--the Renaissance, and limit to the time of the
revival of Greek humanities, really existed, as I have repeatedly
suggested wherever, during the mediaeval centuries, the civilization of
which the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were big was not, by the
pressure of feudalism and monasticism, made to be abortive or stillborn.
Low as was Italy at the very close of the dark ages, and much as she
borrowed for a long while from the more precocious northern nations,
especially France and Provence; Italy had, nevertheless, an enormous
advantage in the fact that her populations were not divided into victor
and vanquished, and that the old Latin institutions of town and country
were never replaced, except in certain northern and southern districts,
by feudal arrangements. The very first thing which strikes us in the
obscure Italian commonwealths of early times, is that in these
resuscitated relics of Roman or Etruscan towns there is no feeling of
feudal superiority and inferiority; that there is no lord, and
consequently no serf. Nor is this the case merely within the city walls.
The never sufficiently appreciated difference between the Italian free
burghs and those of Germany, Flanders, and Provence, is that the
citizens depend only in the remotest and most purely fictitious way upon
any kind of suzerain; and moreover that the country, instead of
belonging to feudal nobles, belong every day more and more completely to
the burghers. The peasant is not a serf, but one of three things--a
hired labourer, a possessor of property, or a farmer, liable to no
taxes, paying no rent, and only sharing with the proprietor the produce
of the land. By this latter system, existing, then as now, throughout
Tuscany, the peasantry was an independent and well-to-do class. The land
owned by one man (who, in the commonwealths, was usually a shopkeeper or
manufacturer in