,
discoveries, analysis of man and nature, than have always been
ascribed to it. The men of that epoch did more hard work for the
world, conferred more sterling benefits on their posterity, than those
who study it chiefly from the point of view of art are ready to admit.
But the mental atmosphere in which those heroes lived and wrought was
one of carelessness with regard to moral duties and religious
aspirations, of exuberant delight in pleasure as an object of
existence. The glorification of the body and the senses, the
repudiation of an ascetic tyranny which had long in theory imposed
impossible abstentions on the carnal man, was a marked feature in
their conception of the world; and connected with this was a return in
no merely superficial spirit to the antique paganism of Greece and
Rome.

These characteristics of the Renaissance we find already outlined with
surprising definiteness, and at the same time with an almost childlike
naivete, a careless, mirth-provoking nonchalance, in the _Carmina
Vagorum_. They remind us of the Italian lyrics which Lorenzo de'
Medici and Poliziano wrote for the Florentine populace; and though in
form and artistic intention they differ from the Latin verse of that
period, their view of life is not dissimilar to that of a Pontano or a
Beccadelli.

Some folk may regard the things I have presented to their view as ugly
or insignificant, because they lack the higher qualities of sentiment;
others may over-value them for precisely the same reason. They seem to
me noteworthy as the first unmistakable sign of a change in modern
Europe which was inevitable and predestined, as the first literary
effort to restore the moral attitude of antiquity which had been
displaced by medieval Christianity. I also feel the special relation
which they bear to English poetry of the Etizabethan age--a relation
that has facilitated their conversion into our language.

That Wandering Students of the twelfth century should have transcended
the limitations of their age; that they should have absorbed so many
elements of life into their scheme of natural enjoyment as the artists
and scholars of the fifteenth; that they should have theorised their
appetites and impulses with Valla, have produced masterpieces of
poetry to rival Ariosto's, or criticisms of society in the style of
Rabelais, was not to be expected. What their lyrics prove by
anticipation is the sincerity of the so-called paganism of the
Renaissance.