our immediate study, the nascent power of liberal thought, and liberal
art, over dead tradition and rude workmanship.

To-day I must ask you to examine in greater detail the exact relation
of this liberal art to the illiberal elements which surrounded it.

62. You do not often hear me use that word "Liberal" in any favourable
sense. I do so now, because I use it also in a very narrow and exact
sense. I mean that the thirteenth century is, in Italy's year of life,
her 17th of March. In the light of it, she assumes her toga virilis;
and it is sacred to her god Liber.

63. To her god _Liber_,--observe: not Dionusos, still less Bacchus, but
her own ancient and simple deity. And if you have read with some care
the statement I gave you, with Carlyle's help, of the moment and manner
of her change from savageness to dexterity, and from rudeness to
refinement of life, you will hear, familiar as the lines are to you,
the invocation in the first Georgic with a new sense of its meaning:--

"Vos, O clarissima mundi
Lumina, labentem coelo quae ducitis annum,
Liber, et alma Ceres; vestro si munere tellus
Chaoniam pingui glandem mutavit arista,
Poculaqu' inventis Acheloia miscuit uvis,
Munera vestra cano."


These gifts, innocent, rich, full of life, exquisitely beautiful in
order and grace of growth, I have thought best to symbolize to you, in
the series of types of the power of the Greek gods, placed in your