Renaissance In Italy

tiviuüiwis Wan 35 when he {Hlbüehed the ftrst volume of "The Renaissance In Italy," and he lived to finish that large undertaking, as well as to write several books of poems and essays, to translate the sonents of Michael Angelo, the memoirs of Cellini and Gozzi and to compose a "Life of Buenaretti," says the Quarterly Review. His activity, great and incessant, though illoess struck him down, ranged over the provinces of llterature wlth an everIpenlng judgment and a fastWious hoice until he could say in an intructlve sentence: "We love the ternest thlngs in Ufe b!3t." For the luties of the historian he was on more han one account singularly disquallfied. Names, dates, events which he had not seen or feit might be learned with facillty, but vanished from his mind as if written in water. "Vague, ill-digested, inaccurate, rich in posslbilitles, poor in solid stuff" - this description of facultles which were to be omployed on a task where Gibbon might have falled, does not inspire ua with conildence. Nor will uietaphor ind magery, whereby Symonds hoped If not to subdue yet to circumvent philosophlcal ideas, furnish that lnslght lacking which a student of the renaissance perlod is sure to put bitter tor sweet and sweot for bitter, to dream that the "worship of the body" is a 'new birth unto freedom,'.' and to degrade science into the apologist of a sensual and decorated unbelief. Seelng he will not see, and hearing he will not understand. These are faults of a more Berious kind than the purple patches and rhetorical tone which their author lias markod in his volume. He moves everywhere on the surfaco, content if he is dealing with painters, poets, liumanlsts, in a fashlon almost operatic and on a system eo conventional that hls characters fall in, line for line, with the legenda and caricatures which a little judicious criticism puts out of court. Large and complex themes - cathollclsm, the reformation, the revival of learning- handled a thousand of times by partisans, striking their roots deep, and aboundlng in tyrannous lndividuallties, that differ as much as Junius II. and St. Charle.s Borromeo, as Erasmus and Poliziano, Luther and Savanarola, would seem to sugegst a weighing and siftlng of evidence and readiness to hear both oides. But Symonds will not always be at the pains to understand the language he is quoting. and so faint is the grasp which he has upon his subject that when a ter more judicial and inqulring comes forward - when Bishop Creighton sets Lhe Roman events in a just perspectiva -he has hardly a word to say beyond the sugge3tion that somewhere, quand meme, an adequate cause must be found Cor the reíormation.