Thus the unruffled calm and dignity of Hellenism was troubled, in its re-birth, with a sense of moral conflict and perplexity unknown to the ancient world. A peculiar mysticism resulted upon literature from that revival of the Platonic spirit which was initiated by Pico della Mirandola and his successors in metaphysical thought. Throughout the Pre-Raphaelite epoch, from Cimabue (124O) to Perugino, the master of Raphael (1446), the impulse of naturalism is seen adjusting itself, through much crudeness of expression, through many blunders, solecisms of taste, errors of selection, to the great spiritual passion of Christianity which was still warm at the heart of the thinking world. There is, especially in early Renaissance work, an effect as of divided aims, or of methods long habituated to the old ideal and brought suddenly into the service of the new,—like Heine’s “decayed gods, who, to maintain themselves after the fall of paganism, took employment under the new religion.” The physical loveliness of the saints and angels of Botticelli and Fra Angelico—the last of the purely “religious” painters, in the common acceptance of the word—is hardly congruous with the loftiness of their themes, and almost belies the spiritual intensity and rapture of thought which Botticelli, in later life, drew largely from the influence of Savonarola, and infused increasingly into his own work. Giotto, the pride of the Florentine school and the dominant genius of the fourteenth century, was no less profoundly religious than these; but in the final roll of art he ranks rather as the first great _Nature_- painter than as one of a distinctly Christian lineage. Taken, like David, from the sheepfold, he brought into art a breezy, pastoral air, and painted before a wide horizon under an open sky. Fra Lippo Lippi added to that wholesome strength and sanity of sight an even clearer perception of natural beauty and grace. The glories of the physical realm, in landscape, in the power of men and in the loveliness of women, were handled now with a growing boldness which outran the delicate timidity that had restrained it in the shadow of the Church. And with the enlargement of intellectual range there came a steady increase of technical power. The skill of choice, of selectiveness in art, of composition, draughtsmanship, colouring,—in a word, the science of _expression_, was brought to bear upon the ready message waiting for the perfecting of its vehicles. The adaptation of language to thought, which was the task of the fifteenth century, was achieved by the immediate predecessors of Raphael in a measure unequalled in the history of the modern world. And that such an adjustment should resolve itself, as it did, into a fresh conflict between the forces momentarily reconciled, proves, not that the success of the effort was spurious, but rather that the struggle between thought and language in art is but one manifestation of the eternal striving of the Spirit with the imperfect