sophisticated and subtilized what they found there. Philosophers, artists, and critics turned their shoulders upon antiquity only when and where no sort of conciliation was possible, and it was only the boldest among them who ventured to do even this. The ancient republics were taken as an example by the politicians, with Livy as their text, as the Bible was by the Christians. Religion, which was exhausted or had been extinguished in the souls of the cultured, was of necessity preserved for the people as an instrument of government, a vulgar form of philosophy: almost all are agreed as to this, from Machiavelli to Bruno. The sage legislator or the 'prince' of Machiavelli and the enlightened despot of Voltaire, who were both of them idealizations of the absolute monarchies that had moulded Europe politically to their will, have substantial affinities; but the sixteenth-century politician, expert in human weaknesses and charged with all the experience of the rich history of Greece and of Rome, studied finesse and transactions, where the enlightened man of the eighteenth century, encouraged by the ever renewed victories of the _Reason,_ raised Reason's banner, and for her took his sword from the scabbard, without feeling the smallest necessity for covering his face with a mask. King Numa created a religion in order to deceive the people, and was praised for it by Machiavelli; but Voltaire would have abused him for doing so, as he abused all inventors of dogmas and promoters of fanaticism. What more is to be said? The rationalism of the Renaissance was especially the work of the Italian genius, so well balanced, so careful to avoid excesses, so accommodating, so artistic; enlightenment, which was especially the work of the French genius, was radical, consequent, apt to run into extremes, logistical. When the genius of the two countries and the two epochs is compared, the enlightenment is bound to appear anti-historical with respect to the Renaissance, which, owing to the comparison thus drawn and instituted with such an object, becomes endowed with a historical sense and with a sense of development which it did not possess, having also been essentially rationalistic and anti-historical, and, in a certain sense, more so than the enlightenment. I say more than the enlightenment, not only because the latter, as I have shown, greatly, increased historical knowledge and ideas, but also precisely because it caused all the contradictions latent in the Renaissance to break out. This was an apparent regression in historical knowledge, but in reality it was an addition to life, and therefore to historical consciousness itself, as we clearly see immediately afterward. The triumph and the catastrophe of the enlightenment was the French Revolution; and this was at the same time the triumph and the catastrophe of its historiography. VI THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ROMANTICISM