“ It lay in the quality of the fighting men. Through a century and a half of freedom, England had been building up a class of sturdy yeomen, peasants who, like the Swiss, lived healthy, hearty, independent lives. France relied only on her nobles; her common folk were as yet a helpless herd of much shorn sheep. The French knights charged as they had charged at Courtrai, with blind, unreasoning valor; and the English peasants, instead of fleeing before them, stood firm and, with deadly accuracy of aim, discharged arrow after arrow into the soon disorganized mass. ”

“ The more moderate among the English confined themselves to insulting language—"Priests, you are not earning the King's money." The doctors, making off in all haste, said tremblingly, "Do not be uneasy, we shall soon have her again."
And it was not the soldiery alone, not the English mob, always so ferocious, which displayed this thirst for blood. The better born, the great, the lords, were no less sanguinary. The King's man, his tutor, the Earl of Warwick, said like the soldiers: "The King's business goes on badly; the girl will not be burned." ”

“ Science, rescued from the hands of astrology, geomancy, alchemy, began her real life with the Renaissance. Since then, as far as to the present moment, she has never ceased to grow. Progressive and durable, science may be called the first-born of the spirit of the modern world.
Thus by the discovery of the world is meant on the one hand the appropriation by civilized humanity of all corners of the habitable world, and on the other the conquest by science of all that we now know about the nature of the universe. In the discovery of man, again, it is possible to trace a twofold process. ”

“ It may assume various changes—an image of beauty, a figure of philosophy, a voice from the other world, a type of heavenly wisdom and joy—but still it holds, in self-imposed and willing thraldom, that creative and versatile and tenacious spirit. It was the dream and hope of too deep and strong a mind to fade and come to naught—to be other than the seed of the achievement and crown of life. But with all faith in the star and the freedom of genius, we may doubt whether the prosperous citizen would have done that which was done by the man without a home. ”

“ In the wake of theological freedom followed a free philosophy, no longer subject to the dogmas of the Church. To purge the Christian faith from false conceptions, to liberate the conscience from the tyranny of priests, and to interpret religion to the reason, has been the work of the last centuries; nor is this work as yet by any means accomplished. On the one side, Descartes and Bacon and Spinoza and Locke are sons of the Renaissance, champions of new-found philosophical freedom; on the other side, Luther is a son of the Renaissance, the herald of new-found religious freedom. ”

“ The English archers then advanced one step forward and shot their arrows with such force and quickness that it seemed as if it snowed. When the Genoese felt these arrows, which pierced their arms, heads, and through their armor, some of them cut the strings of their cross-bows; others flung them on the ground and all turned about and retreated quite discomfited. The French had a large body of men-at-arms on horseback, richly dressed, to support the Genoese. The King of France seeing them thus fall back cried out, "Kill me those scoundrels, for they stop up our road without any reason." ”

“ These troubles and adventures lasted many years; in the course of which, Sigismund, trying all manner of friends and expedients, found in the Burggraves of Nuremberg, Johann and Friedrich, with their talents, possessions, and resources, the main or almost only sure support he got.
No end of troubles to Sigismund, and to Brandenburg through him, from this sublime Hungarian legacy. Like a remote fabulous golden fleece, which you have to go and conquer first, and which is worth little when conquered. ”

“ In short, whatever deeds fanaticism, revenge, avarice, and desperation, in fearful combination, could instigate mankind to perform, were executed in 1349, throughout Germany, Italy, and France, with impunity and in the eyes of all the world. It seemed as if the plague gave rise to scandalous acts and frantic tumults, not to mourning and grief; and the greater part of those who, by their education and rank, were called upon to raise the voice of reason, themselves led on the savage mob to murder and to plunder. ”

“ More than a magnificent poem, more than the beginning of a language and the opening of a national literature, more than the inspirer of art and the glory of a great people, it is one of those rare and solemn monuments of the mind's power which measure and test what it can reach to, which rise up ineffaceably and forever as time goes on marking out its advance by grander divisions than its centuries, and adopted as epochs by the consent of all who come after. ”

“ There he delivered an eloquent speech, pointing out unhesitatingly but temperately the policy which he considered good for the country. "Forget not," he said, "the might and the glory of Flanders. Who, pray, shall forbid that we defend our interests by using our rights? Can the King of France prevent us from treating with the King of England? And may we not be certain that if we were to treat with the King of England, the King of France would not be the less urgent in seeking our alliance? Besides, have we not with us all the communes of Brabant, of Hainault, of Holland, and of Zealand?" ”

“ Superstitious reverence bound the painter to copy the almond eyes and stiff joints of the saints whom he had adored from infancy; and, even had it been otherwise, he lacked the skill to imitate the natural forms he saw around him.
But with the dawning of the Renaissance a new spirit in the arts arose. Men began to conceive that the human body is noble in itself and worthy of patient study. The object of the artist then became to unite devotional feeling and respect for the sacred legend with the utmost beauty and the utmost fidelity of delineation. ”

“ It was now, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, when Italy had lost, indeed, the heroic spirit which we admire in her communes of the thirteenth, but had gained instead ease, wealth, magnificence, and that repose which springs from long prosperity, that the new age at last began. Europe was, as it were, a fallow field, beneath which lay buried the civilization of the Old World. ”

“ As employed by the Genius of the Renaissance, each one of these inventions became a lever by means of which to move the world. Gunpowder revolutionized the art of war. The feudal castle, the armor of the knight and his battle-horse, the prowess of one man against a hundred, and the pride of aristocratic cavalry trampling upon ill-armed militia, were annihilated by the flashes of the cannon. Courage became more a moral than a physical quality. The victory was delivered to the brain of the general. ”

“ There is no shrinking from fellowship and coöperation and conflict with the keen or bold men of the market-place and council hall, in that mind of exquisite and, as drawn by itself, exaggerated sensibility. The doings and characters of men, the workings of society, the fortunes of Italy, were watched and thought of with as deep an interest as the courses of the stars, and read in the real spectacle of life with as profound emotion as in the miraculous page of Vergil ”

“ It is a mistake to regard the Reformation as an isolated phenomenon, or as a mere effort to restore the Church to purity. The Reformation exhibits, in the region of religious thought and national politics, what the Renaissance displays in the sphere of culture, art, and science—the recovered energy and freedom of humanity. We are too apt to treat of history in parcels, and to attempt to draw lessons from detached chapters in the biography of the human race. ”

“ In this mellay the great body of the English army could deal no stroke, swaying helplessly as southern knights or northern spears won some feet of ground. So, in the space between Halbert's bog and the burn, the mellay rang and wavered, the long spears of the Scottish ranks unbroken and pushing forward, the ground before them so covered with fallen men and horses that the English advance was clogged and crushed between the resistance in front and the pressure behind.
"God will have a stroke in every fight," says the romance of Malory. ”

“ Italy created that new spiritual atmosphere of culture and of intellectual freedom which has been the life-breath of the European races. As the Jews are called the chosen and peculiar people of divine revelation, so may the Italians be called the chosen and peculiar vessels of the prophecy of the Renaissance. In art, in scholarship, in science, in the mediation between antique culture and the modern intellect, they took the lead, handing to Germany and France and England the restored humanities complete. Spain and England have since done more for the exploration and colonization of the world. ”

“ In ancient history all that is most memorable and instructive gathers round cities; civilization and empire were concentrated within walls; and it baffled the ancient mind to conceive how power should be possessed and wielded by numbers larger than might be collected in a single market-place. The Roman Empire, indeed, aimed at being one in its administration and law; and it was not a nation nor were its provinces nations, yet everywhere but in Italy it prepared them for becoming nations. ”

“ She was instantly removed—so goes the legend—to the Capitol; and then began a procession of pilgrims from all the quarters of Rome to gaze upon this saint of the old pagan world. In the eyes of those enthusiastic worshippers, her beauty was beyond imagination or description. She was far fairer than any woman of the modern age could hope to be. At last Innocent VIII feared lest the orthodox faith should suffer by this new cult of a heathen corpse. Julia was buried secretly and at night by his direction, and naught remained in the Capitol but her empty marble coffin. ”

“ Philosophy has become the lady of his soul—to write allegorical poems in her honor, and to comment on them with all the apparatus of his learning in prose, his mode of celebrating her. Further, he marries; it is said, not happily. The antiquaries, too, have disturbed romance by discovering that Beatrice also was married some years before her death. He appears, as time goes on, as a burgher of Florence, the father of a family, a politician, an envoy, a magistrate, a partisan, taking his full share in the quarrels of the day. ”

“ It is the first Christian poem; and it opens European literature, as the Iliad did that of Greece and Rome. And, like the Iliad, it has never become out of date; it accompanies in undiminished freshness the literature which it began.
We approach the history of such works, in which genius seems to have pushed its achievements to a new limit. Their bursting out from nothing, and gradual evolution into substance and shape, cast on the mind a solemn influence. They come too near the fount of being to be followed up without our feeling the shadows which surround it. ”

“ It is not easy for us to understand how such a farrago of absurdity, profanity, and indecency could ever have been gravely produced in a so-called court of justice in England as a state paper—a bill of indictment against a body of noblemen and gentlemen; against an order that for two hundred years had been the right arm of the Church and the defender of Christianity against its most dangerous and ruthless enemies. ”

“ The peasantry in Domremy were principally attached to the house of Orleans and the Dauphin, and all the miseries which France endured were there imputed to the Burgundian faction and their allies, the English, who were seeking to enslave unhappy France.
Thus, from infancy to girlhood, Jeanne had heard continually of the woes of the war, and had herself witnessed some of the wretchedness that it caused. A feeling of intense patriotism grew in her with her growth. The deliverance of France from the English was the subject of her reveries by day and her dreams by night. ”

“ The nations were not ready. Franciscans imprisoning Roger Bacon for venturing to examine what God had meant to keep secret; Dominicans preaching crusades against the cultivated nobles of Provence; popes stamping out the seed of enlightened Frederick; Benedictines erasing the masterpieces of classical literature to make way for their own litanies and lurries, or selling pieces of the parchment for charms; a laity devoted by superstition to saints and by sorcery to the devil; a clergy sunk in sensual sloth or fevered with demoniac zeal—these still ruled the intellectual destinies of Europe. ”

“ There seems no reason to believe that Falieri consciously staked the remnant of his life on the forlorn hope of overcoming that awful and pitiless power, with any real hope of establishing his own supremacy. His aspect is rather that of a man betrayed by passion, and wildly forgetful of all possibility in his fierce attempt to free himself and get the upper hand. One cannot but feel in that passion of helpless age and unfriendedness, something of the terrible disappointment of one to whom the real situation of affairs had never been revealed before ”

“ The unmistakable proofs of a deepening effect of nature on the human spirit begin with Dante. Not only does he awaken in us by a few vigorous lines the sense of the morning airs and the trembling light on the distant ocean, or of the grandeur of the storm-beaten forest, but he makes the ascent of lofty peaks, with the only possible object of enjoying the view—the first man, perhaps, since the days of antiquity who did so. In Boccaccio we can do little more than infer how country scenery affected him ”

“ The bowmen do not seem to have been defended by pikes; they fell beneath the lances of the mareschal, as the archers of Ettrick had fallen at Falkirk. The Scottish archers now took heart, and loosed into the crowded and reeling ranks of England, while the flying bowmen of the south clashed against and confused the English charge. Then Scottish archers took to their steel sparths—who ever loved to come to hand strokes—and hewed into the mass of the English, so that the field, whither Bruce brought up his reserves to support Edward Bruce on the right, was a mass of wild, confused fighting. ”

“ All the time they shouted: "A Roman pope! we will have a Roman pope!" Those without echoed back the savage yell. Before long appeared two ecclesiastics, announcing themselves as delegated by the commonalty of Rome; they demanded to speak with the cardinals. The cardinals dared not refuse. The Romans represented, in firm but not disrespectful language, that for seventy years the holy Roman people had been without their pastor, the supreme head of Christendom. In Rome were many noble and wise ecclesiastics equal to govern the Church: if not in Rome, there were such men in Italy. ”