380 CLASSICAL LITERATURE 



"Questi son gli occhi della lingua nostra," he boasts of Cicero and 

 Virgil in the Triumph of Fame. The literature of the Renaissance 

 is equally classic in motive in whatever tongue composed. The 

 exquisite Winnowers' Song of Joachim du Bellay is a paraphrase of 

 the Latin verses of Andrea Navagero, themselves the elaboration 

 of an epigram attributed to Bacchylides in the Palatine Anthology. 

 The sonnet of Angelo di Costanzo selected for special praise by Mr. 

 Garnett is a combination of one of Ovid's Amores in the Octave, with 

 a sestet translated from a conceit of Martial. Such surface indications 

 merely point to the wealth of the mine that awaits the properly 

 equipped explorer of the polyglot Renaissance classicism. Not only 

 may we trace to it countless minor poetic motifs of the " Pleiad " of 

 the Elizabethan and seventeenth-century lyric and of Milton, but 

 it is the source of the French drama, of the literary criticism of the 

 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 1 of their political philosophy, 

 and philosophical rationalism. And even where the classic form 

 became a mere convention, the use of old bottles for the new wine, 

 it was still, as in the days of Schiller, the sun of Homer that ripened 

 the grape, and the old bottles that gave to the vintage its peculiar 

 flavor. The decline of classical studies was a chief symptom, if not 

 cause, of the Italian decadence. The Spanish inquisitor laid his ban 

 at Rome upon that study of Plato which had kindled the enthusiasms 

 and the idealisms of Florence. And when the lowest depth was reached 

 in the conceits and affectations of the Marinists and the Petrarchists, 

 the restoration of dignity and strength began with the return of the 

 worthy if uninspired Chiabrera to Hellenic models. The slow revival 

 of the Italian spirit through the eighteenth century was accompanied. 

 if not caused, by the renewal of serious archaeological and classical 

 studies. United Italy to-day is a vigorous rival of France and Eng- 

 land in the second and more scientific Renaissance of which Germany 

 is the leader, and the names of three enthusiastic Greek scholars, 

 Alfieri, Leopardi, Carducci, who are also the three greatest poets of 

 Modern Italy, bear witness to the unwaning power of Hellenism in 

 her higher literature. 



For three centuries the literary and critical fashions of Europe 

 were set by those of France, which in turn were determined by, or at 

 least reflected, the phases of European scholarship. A revival of 

 classical studies was repeatedly the prelude to a new development 

 in literature. at the Renaissance, in 1660. in the second half of the 

 eighteenth century, in the middle of the nineteenth. Reaction leads 

 to decadence or proves to be the substitution of one form of classical 

 influence for another. The intellectual aridity of the later middle age 

 was partly due to the encroachments of science, as then understood, 

 upon literature in education. The literary studies of the Trivium, 



1 Spingarn, History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, New York, 1899. 



