§ 5. In endeavouring to understand the Renascence, we cannot do better than listen to what Mark Pattison says of it in his “Life of Casaubon”:—“In the fifteenth century was revealed to a world which had hitherto been trained to logical analysis, the beauty of literary form. The conception of style or finished expression had died out with the pagan schools of rhetoric. It was not the despotic act of Justinian in closing the schools of Athens which had suppressed it. The sense of art in language decayed from the same general causes which had been fatal to all artistic perception. Banished from the Roman Empire in the sixth century or earlier, the classical conception of beauty of form re-entered the circle of ideas after near a thousand years of oblivion and abeyance. Cicero and Virgil, Livius and Ovid, had been there all along, but the idea of composite harmony on which their works were constructed was wanting. The restored conception, as if to recoup itself for its long suppression, took entire possession of the mind of Europe. The first period of the Renascence passed in adoration of the awakened beauty, and in efforts to copy and multiply it.” § 6. Here Mark Pattison speaks as if the conception of beauty of form belonged exclusively to the ancients and those who learnt of them. This seems to require some abatement. There are points in which mediæval art far excelled the art of the Renascence. The thirteenth century, as Archbishop Trench has said, was “rich in glorious creations of almost every kind;” and in that century our great English architect, Street, found the root of all that is best in modern art. (See “Dublin Afternoon Lectures,” 1868.) But there are expressions of beauty to which the Greeks, and those who caught their spirit, were keenly alive, and to which the people of the Middle Age seem to have been blind. The first is beauty in the human form; the second is beauty in literature. The old delight in beauty in the human form has never come back to us. Mr. Ruskin tells us we are an ugly race, with ill-shapen limbs, and well pleased with our ugliness and deformity, and in reply we only mutter something about the necessity of clothing both for warmth and decency. But as to the other expression of beauty, beauty in literature, the mind of Europe again became conscious of it in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The re-awakening of this sense of beauty we call the Renascence. § 7. Before we consider the effect of this intellectual revolution on education, let us be sure that we are not “paying ourselves with words,” and that we know exactly what we mean by “literature.”