ck
again into the storm. It would have had to come up a flight of marble
stairs, and through seven or eight antechambers; and so, if it had ever
made its way into the presence chamber, out again through loggias and
corridors innumerable. And the truth which the bird brought with it,
fresh from heaven, has, in like manner, to make its way to the
Renaissance mind through many antechambers, hardly, and as a despised
thing, if at all.

Sec. XLII. Hear another story of those early times.

The king of Jerusalem, Godfrey of Bouillon, at the siege of Asshur, or
Arsur, gave audience to some emirs from Samaria and Naplous. They found
him seated on the ground on a sack of straw. They expressing surprise,
Godfrey answered them: "May not the earth, out of which we came, and
which is to be our dwelling after death, serve us for a seat during
life?"

It is long since such a throne has been set in the reception chambers
of Christendom, or such an answer heard from the lips of a king.

Thus the Renaissance spirit became base both in its abstinence and its
indulgence. Base in its abstinence; curtailing the bright and playful
wealth of form and thought, which filled the architecture of the earlier
ages with sources of delight for their hardy spirit, pure, simple, and
yet rich as the fretwork of flowers and moss, watered by some strong and
stainless mountain stream: and base in its indulgence; as it granted to
the body what it withdrew from the heart, and exhausted, in smoothing
the pavement for the painless feet, and softening the pillow for the
sluggish brain, the powers of art which once had hewn rough ladders into
the clouds of heaven, and set up the stones by which they rested for
houses of God.

Sec. XLIII. And just in proportion as this courtly sensuality lowered
the real nobleness of the men whom birth or fortune raised above their
fellows, rose their estimate of their own dignity, together with the
insolence and unkindness of its expression, and the grossness of the
flattery with which it was fed. Pride is indeed the first and the last
among the sins of men, and there is no age of the world in which it has
not been unveiled in the power and prosperity of the wicked. But there
was never in any form of slavery, or of feudal supremacy, a
forgetfulness so total of the common majesty of the human soul, and of
the brotherly kindness due from man to man, as in the aristocratic
follies in the Renaissance. I have not space to follow