for art, in a people whose most serious enthusiasms were aesthetic.

The speech of the Italians at that epoch, their social habits, their ideal
of manners, their standard of morality, the estimate they formed of men,
were alike conditioned and qualified by art. It was an age of splendid
ceremonies and magnificent parade, when the furniture of houses, the
armour of soldiers, the dress of citizens, the pomp of war, and the
pageantry of festival were invariably and inevitably beautiful. On the
meanest articles of domestic utility, cups and platters, door-panels and
chimney-pieces, coverlets for beds and lids of linen-chests, a wealth of
artistic invention was lavished by innumerable craftsmen, no less skilled
in technical details than distinguished by rare taste. From the Pope upon
S. Peter's chair to the clerks in a Florentine counting-house, every
Italian was a judge of art. Art supplied the spiritual oxygen, without
which the life of the Renaissance must have been atrophied. During that
period of prodigious activity the entire nation seemed to be endowed with
an instinct for the beautiful, and with the capacity for producing it in
every conceivable form. As we travel through Italy at the present day,
when "time, war, pillage, and purchase" have done their worst to denude
the country of its treasures, we still marvel at the incomparable and
countless beauties stored in every burgh and hamlet. Pacing the picture
galleries of Northern Europe, the country seats of English nobles, and the
palaces of Spain, the same reflection is still forced upon us: how could
Italy have done what she achieved within so short a space of time? What
must the houses and the churches once have been, from which these spoils
were taken, but which still remain so rich in masterpieces?
Psychologically to explain this universal capacity for the fine arts in
the nation at this epoch, is perhaps impossible. Yet the fact remains,
that he who would comprehend the Italians of the Renaissance must study
their art, and cling fast to that Ariadne-thread throughout the