Yet Letters and the Arts were flourishing, as in the golden reign of the Lord Nicholas P.P. V. Canon Angelo Ambrogini (detto Poliziano) was showing, in his fine hymn _In Divam Virginem_, that it is possible to write Christian verse in Latin good as Golden; and in his ‘Ερωτικὸν Δωριστί and Ἐρωτικὸν περι του χρυσοκομου that a clergyman of the fifteenth century, whose Greek was not learned at school or college, could indite as dainty verses as Theokritos. Can the twentieth century visualise the fifteenth? Can the twentieth century realise how poor the fifteenth was in material which every board-school boy may have to-day for the asking? The title of the book “De Omnibus Rebus et Quibusdam Aliis,” provokes a guffaw now. Then it was used in sober earnest; for, then, it was possible for one man to know all that was known—so little was there known in the fifteenth century. Dante Alighieri knew all, at the beginning of the fourteenth. Lionardo da Vinci knew all at the beginning of the sixteenth—literally all. Go and look at his manuscript note-books, and see what divers things he knew, to what depth of knowledge he had delved, how ingenious an application he made of the wisdom that he had gained; his inventions of conical bullets, of boats with paddle-wheels, of flying machines, of a cork-apparatus for walking on water. Consider that he was machinist, engineer, architect, and mathematician, constructor of artillery, fortifications, canals, and drains; and that, incidentally, he painted pictures, the lost “Cenacolo” at Milan, which the whole world knows—lost, because Messer Lionardo made the experiment of painting fresco in oil. Mark, too, in the note-books, how artfully and easily he wrote from right to left, to keep his knowledge from vulgar superficial eyes that pried. Mark his fluent gesture, his decisive master-strokes, and the little illuminating diagrams with which he illustrated every page. Can the twentieth century understand that the Italian mind of the fifteenth, in the absence of material, was concentrated on workmanship? Hence the marvels of handicraft which we use for models now, carving, metalwork, and textile design. The workmanship was everything then, in Art and in Letters also. “So long as the form was elegant, according to their standard of taste, the latinity copious and sound, the subject-matter of a book raised no scruples. Students of eminent sobriety, like Guarino da Verona, thought it no harm to welcome Boccadelli’s _Hermaphroditus_ with admiration; while the excellent Nicholas V. spent nine days perusing the filthy satires of Filelfo.” (_Symonds’ Renascence_ II. 574.) The workmanship was everything. The civilisation of the fifteenth century was as high as that of the twentieth, in conception and production of the beautiful. But clearly let it be realised that “civilisation has nothing to do with morality or immorality”; that “great reformers generally destroy the