122 POETRY 



France, in which the principle of kingly authority showed from the 

 first a tendency to be predominant, found little difficulty in recon- 

 ciling, at least superficially, the principle of Catholicism with the 

 principle of the Eenaissance. A Concordat with the Pope enabled 

 Francis I. to repress the inconvenient aspirations of the Gallican 

 Church ; and the Pagan splendor of the late painting and sculpture of 

 Italy was welcomed at the Court of a monarch who boasted the title 

 of the Most Christian King. But the spirit of the Reformation never 

 gained a foothold in the French imagination. Though Clement 

 Marot translated the Psalms, and though Rabelais, in the early editions 

 of his Romances, introduced ideas favorable to the Humanist reform- 

 ers of religion, the general character of Marot's poetry is not devo- 

 tional, and Rabelais made haste to suppress his liberalism as soon as 

 he found it was disapproved by authority. The genius of D'Aubigne, 

 the greatest of the Huguenot writers of mediaeval France, is hardly 

 representative of his nation, and perhaps the only attempt to treat 

 the subject of revealed religion spiritually .in French poetry is Boi- 

 leau's aridly Jansenist Epistle on the Love of God. 



Germany, in the sphere of spiritual thought, has been as unre- 

 servedly on the side of individual liberty as France on the side of 

 central authority. She it was, above all other countries, who nour- 

 ished the genius of the Reformation. In the persons of Luther 

 and Kant she led the revolt against Avhat is established both in 

 Religion and Philosophy. But then Germany, owing to the un- 

 mitigated feudalism of her institutions, was incapable of assimi- 

 lating the intellectual movement of the Renaissance at the same 

 time as the great nations of "Western Europe. The Classical Revival 

 was essentially civic in its origin, and there was in Germany in the 

 sixteenth century no recognized civic centre round which art and litera- 

 ture could organize themselves to the same extent as in France and 

 England. When the different States of the Empire, at the close of 

 the Thirty Years' Wai 1 , settled down into exhausted quietude, the 

 Renaissance began to make its influence felt in the Courts of the 

 Princes; but its operation was entirely opposed to the experience of 

 the European nations of the West. W'inckelmann. Lessing, and 

 Goethe had no doubt a far clearer insight into the nature of Greek 

 art than the French and Italian critics, who followed the pseudo- 

 Aristotelian tradition, but they viewed it in the abstract, as critics 

 and philosophers, and not in its relation to the life of their own 

 country. 



England has marked out for herself a path of Culture between that 

 of France and Germany. The bent of her historical character has 

 been to blend the principles of liberty and auihoritv. She has studied 

 how to accommodate the necessities of innovation with the tradi- 

 tions of old experience. Into our {"Diversities, the cradle- of the 



