This book
alone would entitle us to say that it was the study of antiquity which
made the study of the Middle Ages possible, by first training the mind
to habits of impartial historical criticism. To this must be added,
that the Middle Ages were now over for Italy, and that the Italian mind
could the better appreciate them, because it stood outside them. It
cannot, nevertheless, be said that it at once judged them fairly, let
alone with piety. In the arts a strong prejudice established itself
against all that those centuries had created, and the humanists date
the new era from the time of their own appearance. 'I begin,' says
Boccaccio, 'to hope and believe that God has had mercy on the Italian
name, since I see that His infinite goodness puts souls into the
breasts of the Italians like those of the ancients souls which seek
fame by other means than robbery and violence, but rather on the path
of poetry, which makes men immortal.' But this narrow and unjust temper
did not preclude investigation in the minds of the more gifted men, at
a time, too, when elsewhere in Europe any such investigation would have
been out of the question. A historical criticism of the Middle Ages was
practicable, just because the rational treatment of all subjects by the
humanists had trained the historical spirit. In the fifteenth century
this spirit had so far penetrated the history even of the individual
cities of Italy that the stupid fairy tales about the origin of
Florence, Venice, and Milan vanished, while at the same time, and long
after, the chronicles of the North were stuffed with this fantastic
rubbish, destitute for the most part of all poetical value, and
invented as late as the fourteenth century.
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