As this word is used in histories of literature, art, and philosophy, it implies a freeing of man's mind from the shackles of the Middle Ages; he discovers himself and the world in all its beauty and interest; he shakes off religious dependence and becomes self-reliant; he casts aside the cowl and goes forth joyfully into the sunlight. This awakening has been attributed to a revived interest in the neglected works of the classical authors. They were potent, it has been assumed, to bring new life into a paralysed world, so soon as they become the object of passionate study and emulation. It was they, it has been claimed, that dispelled the gloomy superstition of the Dark Ages and aroused a buoyant spirit of Hellenism which enabled men to soar above the fruitless subtleties of Scholastic Theology. This conception of the Renaissance is much more recent in origin than is usually supposed; it is scarcely more than fifty years old, and finds its first clear presentation in the well-known _Civilisation of the Renaissance_, which the Basel professor, Jacob Burckhardt, published in 1860. Fifteen years later John Addington Symonds began to issue his stately series of volumes on _The Renaissance in Italy_. The charm of his style served to popularise the conception of a distinctive period during which Europe awoke from its winter sleep and developed those traits of character which we deem essentially modern. For a generation or more the Renaissance has been the theme of innumerable popular books and lectures and has constituted a recognised "epoch" in manuals of historical instruction. That it is a convenient term no one will deny! The civilisation of the Italian city states in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries, from Dante to Machiavelli, from Giotto to Raphael, presents so much of rich delight that we ought to have a suitable name for it all. In this sense the expression, Renaissance, will probably continue to be used; but it is safe to predict that as we gain fuller insight into the conditions which preceded and followed this period it will be ranked much lower than hitherto as a time of decisive progress in human knowledge and ideals. Neither Burckhardt nor Symonds were cognisant of the extraordinary achievements of what they called vaguely the Middle Ages. And both of them were so classical-minded as to have but an inadequate appreciation of how slight were the intellectual changes of the Renaissance compared with those that developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the results of which make the world in which we live what it is.