rity of touch, they gradually forgot to look for tenderness of
feeling; imperatively requiring accuracy of knowledge, they gradually
forgot to ask for originality of thought. The thought and the feeling
which they despised departed from them, and they were left to
felicitate themselves on their small science and their neat fingering.
This is the history of the first attack of the Renaissance upon the
Gothic schools, and of its rapid results, more fatal and immediate in
architecture than in any other art, because there the demand for
perfection was less reasonable, and less consistent with the
capabilities of the workman; being utterly opposed to that rudeness or
savageness on which, as we saw above, the nobility of the elder schools
in great part depends. But inasmuch as the innovations were founded on
some of the most beautiful examples of art, and headed by some of the
greatest men that the world ever saw, and as the Gothic with which they
interfered was corrupt and valueless, the first appearance of the
Renaissance feeling had the appearance of a healthy movement. A new
energy replaced whatever weariness or dulness had affected the Gothic
mind; an exquisite taste and refinement, aided by extended knowledge,
furnished the first models of the new school; and over the whole of
Italy a style arose, generally now known as cinque-cento, which in
sculpture and painting, as I just stated, produced the noblest masters
which the world ever saw, headed by Michael Angelo, Raphael, and
Leonardo; but which failed of doing the same in architecture, because,
as we have seen above, perfection is therein not possible, and failed
more totally than it would otherwise have done, because the classical
enthusiasm had destroyed the best types of architectural form.

Sec. XVII. For, observe here very carefully, the Renaissance principle,
as it consisted in a demand for universal perfection, is quite distinct
from the Renaissance principle as it consists in a demand for classical
and Roman _forms_ of perfection. And if I had space to follow out the
subject as I should desire, I would first endeavor to ascertain what
might have been the course of the art of Europe if no manuscripts of
classical authors had been recovered, and no remains of classical
architecture left, in the fifteenth century; so that the executive
perfection to which the efforts of all great men had tended for five
hundred years, and which now at last was reached, might have b