Then follows the defence of poetry, the
praise of it, and especially of the deeper and allegorical meanings
which we must always attribute to it, and of that calculated obscurity
which is intended to repel the dull minds of the ignorant.
And finally, with a clear reference to his own scholarly work, the
writer justifies the new relation in which his age stood to paganism.
The case was wholly different, he pleads, when the Early Church had to
fight its way among the heathen. Now--praised be Jesus Christ !--true
religion was strengthened, paganism destroyed, and the victorious
Church in possession of the hostile camp. It was now possible to touch
and study paganism almost _(fere) _without danger. This is the argument
invariably used in later times to defend the Renaissance.
There was thus a new cause in the world and a new class of men to
maintain it. It is idle to ask if this cause ought not to have stopped
short in its career of victory, to have restrained itself deliberately,
and conceded the first place to purely national elements of culture. No
conviction was more firmly rooted in the popular mind than that
antiquity was the highest title to glory which Italy possessed.
There was a symbolical ceremony peculiar to the first generation of
poet-scholars which lasted on into the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, though losing the higher sentiment which inspired it--the
coronation of the poets with the laurel wreath.
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