In Italy, too, art and poetry flourished in her beautiful language; and classical erudition made considerable progress, and even arrived to a very advanced state, during that troubled period when the rest of Europe was involved in religious disputes and civil wars. But the fair and flourishing Italian literature of that age may be compared to a blooming garden, situated on a volcanic soil. No immediate danger then threatened Italy, though we are not to estimate private opinions by the standard of those which publicly prevailed; there were at least no public examples of that excessive partiality and passionate enthusiasm for Pagan antiquity, which occurred in that earlier and brilliant period of moral ferment and false security--the fifteenth century. On the contrary, in some individual instances the real progress of science was impeded, and on the whole its march retarded by a dread of the danger of its abuse; and hence the old scholasticism remained longer than was right in hereditary possession of its exclusive empire, although that contentious and partly negative Rationalism of the middle age was ill calculated to supply the place of a truly Christian philosophy, which the circumstances of the church then so imperiously demanded. It should then have been borne in mind, that every new error--every new shape which the old Proteus may assume in the changing spirit of time, requires, not indeed a new philosophy (for philosophy itself, which is, as the ancients said, the science of divine and human things, is in the sanctuary of its highest subjects and problems an edifice unchangeable through all ages, and built on the everlasting foundation of divine truth), but a new form and direction given to philosophy, a new resuscitation of its powers. Indeed the venerable Bishop and holy man of God, St. Charles Borromeo, had in his Manual of Religion furnished an example, in which we see the utmost profundity of ascetic science united with a beautiful lucidness of expression, and the greatest simplicity and purity of taste. But the regular philosophy of the schools remained for a long time yet much too scholastic; and it was prejudicial, or at least disadvantageous to the Catholic cause, that the first foundations of a better philosophy, of one at least more faithful to its high vocation, and of an enlarged and improved science, should have been laid by men, like Bacon and Leibnitz, who belonged to the opposite party.