religions of the world were to be reconciled, not as successive stages,
in a gradual development of the religious sense, but as subsisting side
by side, and substantially in agreement with each other. And here the
first necessity was to misrepresent the language, the conceptions, the
sentiments, it was proposed to compare and reconcile. Plato and Homer
must be made to speak agreeably to Moses. Set side by side, the mere
surfaces could never unite in any harmony of design. Therefore one must
go below the surface, and bring up the supposed secondary, or still more
remote meaning, that diviner signification held in reserve, in recessu
divinius aliquid, latent in some stray touch of Homer, or figure of
speech in the books of Moses.

And yet as a curiosity of the human mind, a "madhouse-cell," if you
will, into which we peep for a moment, and see it at work weaving
strange fancies, the allegorical interpretation of the fifteenth century
has its interest. With its strange web of imagery, its quaint conceits,
its unexpected combinations and subtle moralising, it is an element in
the local colour of a great age. It illustrates also the faith of that
age in all oracles, its desire to hear all voices, its generous belief
that nothing which had ever interested the human mind could wholly lose
its vitality. It is the counterpart, though certainly the feebler
counterpart, of that practical truce and reconciliation of the gods of
Greece with the Christian religion, which is seen in the art of the
time; and it is for his share in this work, and because his own story is
a sort of analogue or visible equivalent to the expression of this
purpose in his writings, that something of a general interest still
belongs to the name of Pico della Mirandola, whose life, written by his
nephew Francis, seemed worthy, for some touch of sweetness in it, to be
translated out of the original Latin by Sir Thomas More, that great
lover of Italian culture, among whose works this life of Pico, Earl