achievements of what, as Christian art, is often falsely opposed to
the Renaissance, were another result. This outbreak of the human
spirit may be traced far into the middle age itself, with its motives
already clearly pronounced, the care for physical beauty, the
worship of the body, the breaking down of those limits which the
religious system of the middle age imposed on the heart and the
imagination. I have taken as an example of this movement, this
earlier Renaissance within the middle age itself, and as an
expression of its qualities, two little compositions in early
French; not because they constitute the best possible expression
of them, but because they help the unity of my series, inasmuch
as the Renaissance ends also in France, in French poetry, in a
phase of which the writings of Joachim du Bellay are in many
ways the most perfect illustration. The Renaissance, in truth, put
forth in France an aftermath, a wonderful later growth, the
products of which have to the full that subtle and delicate
sweetness which belongs to a refined and comely [xiii]
decadence, just as its earliest phases have the freshness which
belongs to all periods of growth in art, the charm of ascesis, of
the austere and serious girding of the loins in youth.

But it is in Italy, in the fifteenth century, that the interest of the
Renaissance mainly lies,--in that solemn fifteenth century which
can hardly be studied too much, not merely for its positive results
in the things of the intellect and the imagination, its concrete
works of art, its special and prominent personalities, with their
profound aesthetic charm, but for its general spirit and character,
for the ethical qualities of which it is a consummate type.

The various forms of intellectual activity which together make