The reigns of Dukes Federigo and Guidobaldo I. extended over a period which general consent has regarded as the most brilliant in Italian history, and which we have repeatedly named its golden age. High expectations are naturally entertained of literature, arts, and general refinement in a cycle of such pretension. We look for a rapid advance of thought in paths of learning and science whence during long centuries it had been excluded. We anticipate a widely disseminated zeal for classic writers, an eager rivalry to outstrip them in branches of speculative knowledge, which they especially cultivated. We imagine the imitative arts revived under the influence of new and more exquisite standards. And we reckon upon the diffusion of a taste and capacity for enjoying those things among classes hitherto excluded from such intellectual enjoyments. In each of these expectations the student of literary history will be gratified; yet there are several sorts of composition which, if separately examined, offer disappointing results, and scarcely a single work written during the fifteenth century has maintained universal popularity. The explanation is easy. This age was one of unprecedented intellectual activity, when men's minds were devoted to the acquisition of knowledge which they had laboriously to hunt out, and doubtingly to decipher. They had to cut for themselves tracks through an unexplored region, without grammars or commentaries to serve them as guides and landmarks. The toilsome habits thus formed were forthwith exercised for the benefit of subsequent investigators, and were applied to smoothing the path which they had themselves penetrated. Thus was it that the first successful scholars became grammarians and commentators. Surrounded by ample stores of intelligence, they had no occasion to cultivate new germs of thought. Their first object was to secure and render accessible the treasures which antiquity had unfolded to them; their next, to elaborate them in varied forms, to reproduce them in the manner most congenial to their intellectual wants. Thus they became more industrious than original, laborious rather than creative. Again, those who, on entering the garden of knowledge, thought of its fruits rather than of its approaches, instead of seeking the reward of their toils among the fair mazes of poetry and belles lettres, aimed at more arduous rewards, and climbed the loftiest and most slippery branches in search of golden apples. The harvest of scholastic philosophy which they thus gathered in may seem scarcely worthy of the fatigues given to its acquisition; but from the seeds so obtained, cultivated and matured as they have been by many after labourers, a copious and healthful store of intellectual food has been secured for subsequent generations. The work performed by these pioneers of learning and truth was, however, more calculated to crush than to inspire that more elastic fancy