highest point of development in Ariosto. The main motives supplied to
art by mediaeval traditions and humanistic enthusiasm were worked out.
Nor was this all. The Renaissance had created a critical spirit which
penetrated every branch of art and letters. It was not possible to
advance further on the old lines; yet painters, sculptors, architects,
and poets of the rising generation had before their eyes the
masterpieces of their predecessors, in their minds the precepts of the
learned. All alike were rendered awkward and self-conscious by the sense
of laboring at a disadvantage, and by the dread of academical
censorship.

In truth, this critical spirit, which was the final product of the
Renaissance in Italy, favored the development of new powers in the
nation: it hampered workers in the elder spheres of art, literature, and
scholarship; but it set thinkers upon the track of those investigations
which we call scientific. I shall endeavor, in a future chapter, to show
how the Italians were now upon the point of carrying the ardor of the
Renaissance into fresh fields of physical discovery and speculation,
when their evolution was suspended by the Catholic Reaction. But here
it must suffice to observe that formalism had succeeded by the operation
of natural influences to the vigor and inventiveness of the national
genius in the main departments of literature and fine art.

If we study the development of other European races, we shall find that
each of them in turn, at its due season, passed through similar phases.
The mediaeval period ends in the efflorescence of a new delightful
energy, which gives a Rabelais, a Shakspere, a Cervantes to the world.
The Renaissance riots itself away in Marinism, Gongorism, Euphuism, and
the affectations of the Hôtel Rambouillet. This age is succeeded by a
colder, more critical, more formal age of obedience to fixed canons,