e have, moreover, to
remember the Cathari, the Paterini, the Fraticelli, the Albigenses, the
Hussites--heretics in whom the new light dimly shone, but who were
instantly exterminated by the Church. We have to commemorate the vast
conception of the Emperor Frederick II., who strove to found a new
society of humane culture in the South of Europe, and to anticipate the
advent of the spirit of modern tolerance. He, too, and all his race were
exterminated by the Papal jealousy. Truly we may say with Michelet that
the Sibyl of the Renaissance kept offering her books in vain to feudal
Europe. In vain because the time was not yet. The ideas projected thus
early on the modern world were immature and abortive, like those
headless trunks and zoophitic members of half-molded humanity which, in
the vision of Empedocles, preceded the birth of full-formed man. The
nations were not ready. Franciscans imprisoning Roger Bacon for
venturing to examine what God had meant to keep secret; Dominicans
preaching crusades against the cultivated nobles of Toulouse; Popes
stamping out the seed of enlightened Frederick; Benedictines erasing the
masterpieces of classical literature to make way for their own litanies
and lurries, or selling pieces of the parchment for charms; a laity
devoted by superstition to saints and by sorcery to the devil; a clergy
sunk in sensual sloth or fevered with demoniac zeal: these still ruled
the intellectual destinies of Europe. Therefore the first anticipations
of the Renaissance were fragmentary and sterile.

Then came a second period. Dante's poem, a work of conscious art,
conceived in a modern spirit and written in a modern tongue, was the
first true sign that Italy, the leader of the nations of the West, had
shaken off her sleep. Petrarch followed. His ideal, of antique culture
as the everlasting solace and the universal education of the human race,
his lifelong effort to recover the classical harmony of thought and
speech, gave a direct impulse to one of the chief movements of the
Renaissance--its passionate outgoing toward the ancient world. After
Petrarch, Boccaccio opened yet another channel for the stream of
freedom. His conception of human existence as joy to be accepted with
thanksgiving, not as a gloomy error to be rectified by suffering,
familiarized the fourteenth century with that form of semi-pagan
gladness which marked the real Renaissance.

In Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio Italy recovered the cons