the eighteenth century, really belongs in spirit to an earlier age.
By his enthusiasm for the things of the intellect [xv] and the
imagination for their own sake, by his Hellenism, his life-long
struggle to attain the Greek spirit, he is in sympathy with the
humanists of a previous century. He is the last fruit of the
Renaissance, and explains in a striking way its motive and
tendencies.

1873.



TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES

Yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove.

[1] THE history of the Renaissance ends in France, and carries us
away from Italy to the beautiful cities of the country of the Loire.
But it was in France also, in a very important sense, that the
Renaissance had begun. French writers, who are fond of
connecting the creations of Italian genius with a French origin,
who tell us how Saint Francis of Assisi took not his name only,
but all those notions of chivalry and romantic love which so
deeply penetrated his thoughts, from a French source, how
Boccaccio borrowed the outlines of his stories from the old
French fabliaux, and how Dante himself expressly connects the
origin of the art of miniature-painting with the city of Paris, have
often dwelt on this notion of a Renaissance in the end of the
twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, a Renaissance
within the limits of the middle age itself--a brilliant, but in part