and all the history which have been learned in a life of
leisure and study. How different the emotions of a Ruskin or a Tennyson,
in surveying those costly piles, from those of a man fresh from a
distillery or from a warehouse of cotton fabrics, or even from those of
many fashionable women, whose only aesthetic accomplishment is to play
languidly and mechanically on an instrument, and whose only intellectual
achievement is to have devoured a dozen silly novels in the course of a
summer spent in alternate sleep and dalliance! Nor does familiarity
always give a zest to the pleasure which arises from the creations of
art or the glories of nature. The Roman beggar passes the Coliseum or
St. Peter's without notice or enjoyment, as a peasant sees unmoved the
snow-capped mountains of Switzerland or the beautiful lakes of
Killarney. Said sorrowfully my guide up the Rhigi, "I wish I lived in
Holland, for there are men there." Yet there are those whom the ascent
of Rhigi and the ruined monuments of ancient Rome would haunt for a
lifetime, in whose memory they would be perpetually fresh, never to pass
away, any more than the looks and the vows of early love from the mind
of a sentimental woman.

The glorious old architecture whose peculiarity was the pointed arch,
flourished only about three hundred years in its purity and matchless
beauty. Then another change took place. The ideal became lost in
meaningless ornaments. The human figure peoples the naked walls. "Man
places his own image everywhere.... The tomb rises like a mausoleum in
side chapels. Man is enthroned, not God." The corruption of the art
keeps pace with the corruption of the Papacy and the discords of
society. In the fourteenth century the Mediaeval has lost its charm
and faith.

And then sets in the new era, which begins with Michael Angelo. It is
marked by the revival of Greek art and Greek literature. At Florence
reign the Medici. On the throne of Saint Peter sits an Alexander VI. or
a Julius II. Genoa is a city of merchant-palaces. Museums are collected
of the excavated remains of Roman antiquity. Everybody kindles with the
contemplation of the long-buried glories of a classic age; everybody
reads the classic authors: Cicero is a greater oracle than Saint
Augustine. Scholars flock to Italy. The popes encourage the growing
taste for Pagan philosophy. Ancient art regains her long-abdicated
throne, and wields her sceptre over the worshippers of the Parthenon and