, and
from hamlet laughing under vines; from her great wasted cities, from her
small fierce walled towns, from her lone sea-shores ravaged by the
galleys of the Turks, from her villages on hill and plain that struggled
into life through the invaders' fires, and pushed their vineshoots over
the tombs of kings, everywhere all over her peaceful soil, such men
arose.

Not men alone who were great in a known art, thought or science, of
these the name was legion; but men in whose brains, art, thought, or
science took new forms, was born into new life, spoke with new voice,
and sprang full armed a new Athene.

Leave Rome aside, I say, and think of Italy; measure her gifts, which
with the lavish waste of genius she has flung broadcast in grand and
heedless sacrifice, and tell me if the face of earth would not be dark
and drear as any Scythian desert without these?

She was the rose of the world, aye--so they bruised and trampled her,
and yet the breath of heaven was ever in her.

She was the world's nightingale, aye--so they burned her eyes out and
sheared her wings, and yet she sang.

But she was yet more than these: she was the light of the world: a light
set on a hill, a light unquenchable. A light which through the darkness
of the darkest night has been a Pharos to the drowning faiths and dying
hopes of man.

* * *

"It must have been such a good life--a painter's--in those days; those
early days of art. Fancy the gladness of it then--modern painters can
know nothing of it.

"When all the delicate delights of distance were only half perceived;
when the treatment of light and shadow was barely dreamed of; when
aerial perspective was just breaking on the mind in all its wonder and
power; when it was still regarded as a marvellous boldness to draw from
the natural form in a natural fashion;--in those early days only fancy
the delights of a painter!

"Something fresh to be won at each step; something new to be penetrated
at each moment; something beautiful and rash to be ventured on with each
touch of colour,--the painter in those days had all the breathless
pleasure of an explorer; without leaving his birthplace he knew the joys
of Columbus.

"And then the reverence that waited on him.

"He was a man who glorified God amongst a people that believed in God.

"What he did was a reality to himself and those around him. Spinello
fainted before the Satanas he portrayed, and Angelico deemed it
bla