The comprehensive and many-sided natures, frequent in Renaissance Italy, were specially adapted for the dissemination of the new spirit. The appearance of such men as Leo Battista Alberti, Lionardo da Vinci, Lorenzo de' Medici, Brunelleschi and Buonarroti, Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola, upon the stage of the Renaissance is not the least fascinating of its phenomena. We can only find their parallels by returning to the age of Pericles. But the problem for the Florentines differed from that which the Athenians had before them. In Greece, the morning-land of civilisation, men of genius, each perfect in his own capacity, were needed. Standards had to be created for the future guidance of the world in all the realms of art and thought. We are therefore less struck with the versatility than with the concentration of Pheidias, Pindar, Sophocles, Socrates. Italy, on the other hand, had for her task the reabsorption of a bygone culture. It was her vocation to resuscitate antiquity, to gather up afresh the products of the classic past, and so to blend them with the mediæval spirit as to generate what is specifically modern. It was indispensable that the men by whom this work was accomplished should be no less distinguished for largeness of intelligence, variety of acquirements, quickness of sympathy, and sensitive susceptibility, than for the complete development of some one faculty. The great characters of the Greek age were what Hegel calls plastic, penetrated through and through with a specific quality. Those of the Italian age were comprehensive and encyclopædic; the intensity of their force in any one sphere is less remarkable than its suitableness to all. They were of a nature to synthesise, interpret, reproduce, and mould afresh--like Mr. Browning's Cleon, with the addition of the consciousness of young and potent energy within them. It consequently happens that, except in the sphere of the Fine Arts, we are tempted to underrate the heroes of the Renaissance. The impression they leave upon our minds at any one point is slight in comparison with the estimate we form of them when we consider each man as a whole. Nor can we point to monumental and colossal works in proof of their creative faculty.