it, as it becomes broad-minded age to be tolerantly in sympathy with the
youth whose follies it perceives. Life is an ephemeral business, and we
waste too much of it in judging where it would beseem us better to
accept, that we ourselves may come to be accepted by such future ages as
may pursue the study of us.

But if it be wrong to judge a past epoch collectively by the standards of
our own time, how much more is it not wrong to single out individuals for
judgement by those same standards, after detaching them for the purpose
from the environment in which they had their being? How false must be
the conception of them thus obtained! We view the individuals so
selected through a microscope of modern focus. They appear monstrous and
abnormal, and we straight-way assume them to be monsters and
abnormalities, never considering that the fault is in the adjustment of
the instrument through which we inspect them, and that until that is
corrected others of that same past age, if similarly viewed, must appear
similarly distorted.

Hence it follows that some study of an age must ever prelude and
accompany the study of its individuals, if comprehension is to wait upon
our labours. To proceed otherwise is to judge an individual Hottentot or
South Sea Islander by the code of manners that obtains in Belgravia or
Mayfair.

Mind being the seat of the soul, and literature being the expression of
the mind, literature, it follows, is the soul of an age, the surviving
and immortal part of it; and in the literature of the Cinquecento you
shall behold for the looking the ardent, unmoral, naïve soul of this
Renaissance that was sprawling in its lusty, naked infancy and bellowing
hungrily for the pap of knowledge, and for other things. You shall infer