Methuen & Ca, Mr. Vaughan's took mainly reproduces. University Extension lectures, and this accounts for its Special ind of usefulness and for some defects. In studies meant to rouse a first picturesque interest superficiality is almost essential, and a style serviceable on the platform has a way of seeming un-{ustidious in cold print. It does in hearty fashion, however, what it set onl to do, but where isthe selected bioliogra phy which should draw his audience on? Mr. Vaughan's concern is mainly with the artistic side of the Renaissance and very little with the intellectual aspect "of the Period, though the statecraft is by no means ignored, His lectures must have been pleasant occasions, for the Renaissance is treated as a Benial, jolly time. And so it was if YoU were top dog or anywhere near that level. If evil deeds were per-betta, were they hem you were grounding, what a feast your eyes! had! "Hungry? But man does not! live by reed alone. The generous fosterers of great Italien art get their due, and the author clogwent. on the slanderous jealousy and hideous party spirit of their detractors, so noisy and prolonged that they have blackened the fame of meritorious persons and houses this day. Here we must keep our heads, buat it_ will do no harm if the average English reader be made to feel that a. merely political judg. ment hardly does justice. to th chievenanets of the Medici. What hharm in his laughing at the Borgi agy? Poisont- Nonsense! he say: What was known of poison in their: day? There were worse Popes than Alexander, that fond father, with such a taste for art too, Lucrezia was "pretty and quite cultivated nonentity. And the beautiful Caesar had in him the potentiality Of being the saviour of Italy, The attitude is not defiantly pleasant, In his man-of-the-world standpoint And his. dislike of the professional independence of judg. are always sincere, need not share In the ables study, that on] Machiavelli—with whom as a great Italian, he holds, only Dante can complete,—the complacent assertion that if "The Prince" ex-most forcible means of weighing as a tyrant, it also reveals these very aims and' methods to the readee.* It it be a poison it "carries its own antidote within itself." But 30 night a criminal be justified as shoving himself an awful example! Machiavelli was a great master of Ialian prose and a. profoundly intereitinge human being. His remedy for the" domination of his country by the foreigner was far in advance! of his age, and, defeated, never died. "Bout the idea of unity owed iiumnph in the Risorgimento ther gonnees besides "The Prince, and parer ones. Lord Acton's word of him, "a constant and contemporary influence," if eulogy, is. also warning.
One misses the force drama of inged Intolerance, headstrong will, and gentle purity' in Savonarola, Some of the strong savour has gone out of that roffanly gonias Cellini, and the exitic's charity barely stretches to the illhumours of the Htom-tossed and tormented Michelangda, But he will persuasively lead many who have capriciously strayed beck to the good company of Raphael, the splendid and fracas youth. Aa.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.