rship, and done with system. Falsehood in a
Ciceronian dialect had no opposers; truth in patois no listeners. A
Roman phrase was thought worth any number of Gothic facts. The sciences
ceased at once to be anything more than different kinds of
grammars,--grammar of language, grammar of logic, grammar of ethics,
grammar of art; and the tongue, wit, and invention of the human race
were supposed to have found their utmost and most divine mission in
syntax and syllogism, perspective and five orders.

Of such knowledge as this, nothing but pride could come; and, therefore,
I have called the first mental characteristic of the Renaissance
schools, the "pride" of science. If they had reached any science worth
the name, they might have loved it; but of the paltry knowledge they
possessed, they could only be proud. There was not anything in it
capable of being loved. Anatomy, indeed, then first made a subject of
accurate study, is a true science, but not so attractive as to enlist
the affections strongly on its side: and therefore, like its meaner
sisters, it became merely a ground for pride; and the one main purpose
of the Renaissance artists, in all their work, was to show how much they
knew.

Sec. XXXIII. There were, of course, noble exceptions; but chiefly
belonging to the earliest periods of the Renaissance, when its teaching
had not yet produced its full effect. Raphael, Leonardo, and Michael
Angelo were all trained in the old school; they all had masters who knew
the true ends of art, and had reached them; masters nearly as great as
they were themselves, but imbued with the old religious and earnest
spirit, which their disciples receiving from them, and drinking at the
same time deeply from all the fountains of knowledge opened in their day,
became the world's wonders. Then the dull wondering world believed that
their greatness rose out of their new knowledge, instead of out of that
ancient religious root, in which to abide was life, from which to be
severed was annihilation. And from that day to this, they have tried to
produce Michael Angelos and Leonardos by teaching the barren sciences,
and still have mourned and marvelled that no more Michael Angelos came;
not perceiving that those great Fathers were only able to receive such
nourishment because they were rooted on the rock of all ages, and that
our scientific teaching, nowadays, is nothing more nor less than the
assiduous watering of trees whose stems are cut through