In this unbroken sequence of events, a place of prime importance must be assigned to the Renaissance; and the Italian race at that moment must be regarded, for a short while at least, as the protagonist of the universal drama. The first stage of civilization is by common consent assigned to the Eastern empires of remote antiquity; the second to the Hellenic system of civic liberty and intellectual energy; the third to Roman organization. During the third period a new spiritual force was evolved in Christianity, and new factors were introduced into Europe by the immigration of the Northern races. The fourth historical period is occupied by the Church and feudalism, the first inheriting Roman organization, the second helping to constitute the immigrant races into new nationalities. The fifth great epoch is the emancipation of modern Europe from medieval influences. We may be said to live in it; for though the work of liberation has in large measure been accomplished, no new social principle or comprehensive system has yet supervened. Three movements in the process can, however, be discerned; and these are respectively known by the names of Renaissance, Reformation, Revolution. It was in the first of these three stages that Italy determined the course of civilization. To neglect the work achieved by Italy, before the other nations of Europe had emerged from feudalism, is tantamount to dropping a link indispensable to the strength and cohesion of the whole chain.
Accustomed to regard the Church as a political member of their own confederation, and withdrawn from the feudal system by the action of their communes, the Italians were specially fitted to perform their task. The conditions under which they lived as the inheritors of Rome, obliged them to look backward instead of forward; and from this necessity emerged the Revival of Learning, which not only restored the interrupted consciousness of human unity, but supplied the needful starting-point for a new period of intellectual growth. The connection between the study of classical literature, scientific investigation, and Biblical criticism, has been already insisted on in this work. From the Renaissance sprang the Reformation, veiling the same spirit in another form, before the Church bethought herself of quenching the new light in Italy. Without the skeptical and critical industry of the Italians; without their bold explorations in the fields of philosophy, theology and political science; without their digging round the roots of human knowledge; without their frank disavowal of past medieval transcendentalism; neither the German Reformation nor the advance of speculative thought in France, Holland and England, would have been possible.
To pursue the subject further is not necessary. How the Revolution was linked to the Reformation by the intermediate action of Holland, England and America; and how the European peoples, educated after the type designed by Italian humanists, formed their literatures, built up philosophies, and based positive inquiry on solid foundations, are matters too well known and have too often been already noted to need illustration. It is enough for a student of the Renaissance to have suggested that the peculiar circumstances and sympathies of the Italians, at a certain moment of this modern evolution, forced and enabled them to do what was imperatively demanded for its after progress. That they led the van of liberation; that, like the Jews and Greeks, their predecessors, they sacrificed their independence in the very triumph of achievement; are claims upon our everlasting gratitude. This lends the interest of romance or drama to the doleful tale of depredation and enslavement which concludes the history of the Italian Renaissance.
APPENDICES.
APPENDIX I.
(See above, [chapter xi.])