Italian literature cannot compare with English literature or French in compass, variety, richness, or delicacy. Indeed, except for Dante, it would have rather a thin and tinkling sound. Nevertheless, in the High Renaissance it roused itself brilliantly. Niccolo Machiavelli was the ablest writer on the policy of government between Aristotle and Burke. Guicciardini was the first modern historian. Count Baldassare Castiglione's "Book of the Courtier" is as singularly excellent in its way as Boswell's "Life of Johnson." Of this book, which portrays fashionable society at the elegant court of Urbino, Tasso says: "So long as there shall be princes and courts, so long as ladies and gentlemen shall meet in society, so long as virtue and courtesy shall abide in our hearts, the name of Castiglione will be held in honour." The book purports to be a series of conversations between the duchess and her guests concerning the proper qualities of a perfect gentleman. This society, no doubt, is a little affected, stilted, and conceited, but it is dignified, well-behaved, and high-minded. These people discuss deportment, athletics, propriety of speech, whether one must keep within the Tuscan vocabulary of Petrarch and Boccaccio or may make use of the vernacular spoken elsewhere, whether painting or sculpture is the nobler art, what a gentleman's dress should be, and so on. The discussion proceeds to the proper behaviour of a lady, and by natural steps to love. Bembo, a famous litterateur, here takes the floor, plunges into Platonic ideas, and argues that the higher love, governed by reason, is better than lower love, and will lead to contemplation of universal beauty; but that even this stage of love is imperfect, and the lover must mount higher still, until his soul, purified by philosophy and spiritual life, sees the light of angelic beauty and, ravished by the splendour of that light, becomes intoxicated and beside itself from passion to lose itself in the light. "Let us, then, direct all the thoughts and forces of our soul to this most sacred light, which shows us the way that leads to heaven; and following after it, let us lay aside the passions wherewith we were clothed at our fall, and by the stairway that bears the shadow of sensual beauty on its lowest step, let us mount to the lofty mansion where dwells the heavenly, lovely, and true beauty, which lies hidden in the inmost secret recesses of God, so that profane eyes cannot behold it,"[21] etc. This may savour somewhat too much of Platonic rhetoric, but such feelings were genuine, emotionally genuine, even if they proved evanescent in practice; they were familiar to Lorenzo dei Medici and his friends, and to the nobler spirits throughout Italy, and are as characteristic of the period as its cruelty, treachery, or sensuality. The effect of such cultivated circles upon art must have been great; they gave artists encouragement, sympathy, employment, and by the union of fashion and intelligence