over into what we call the modern world came first from Italy. Italy, like
the rest of the Roman Empire, had been overrun and conquered in the fifth
century by the barbarian Teutonic tribes, but the devastation had been less
complete there than in the more northern lands, and there, even more,
perhaps, than in France, the bulk of the people remained Latin in blood and
in character. Hence it resulted that though the Middle Ages were in Italy a
period of terrible political anarchy, yet Italian culture recovered far
more rapidly than that of the northern nations, whom the Italians continued
down to the modern period to regard contemptuously as still mere
barbarians. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, further, the
Italians had become intellectually one of the keenest races whom the world
has ever known, though in morals they were sinking to almost incredible
corruption. Already in fourteenth century Italy, therefore, the movement
for a much fuller and freer intellectual life had begun, and we have seen
that by Petrarch and Boccaccio something of this spirit was transmitted to
Chaucer. In England Chaucer was followed by the medievalizing fifteenth
century, but in Italy there was no such interruption.

The Renaissance movement first received definite direction from the
rediscovery and study of Greek literature, which clearly revealed the
unbounded possibilities of life to men who had been groping dissatisfied
within the now narrow limits of medieval thought. Before Chaucer was dead
the study of Greek, almost forgotten in Western Europe during the Middle
Ages, had been renewed in Italy, and it received a still further impulse
when at the taking of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 Greek scholars
and manuscripts were scattered to the West. It is hard for us to-day to
realize the meaning for the men of the fifteenth century of this revived
knowledge of the life and thought of the Greek race. The medieval Church,
at first merely from the brutal necessities of a period of anarchy, had for
the most part frowned on the joy and beauty of life, permitting pleasure,