translated into English, with much graceful scholarship, by Mr. F.
W. Bourdillon. Still more recently we have had a translation--a
poet's translation--from the ingenious and versatile pen of Mr.
Andrew Lang. The reader should consult also the chapter on
"The Out-door Poetry," in Vernon Lee's most interesting
Euphorion; being Studies of the Antique and Mediaeval in the
Renaissance, a work abounding in knowledge and insight on the
subjects of which it treats.

26. *Parage, peerage:--which came to signify all that ambitious
youth affected most on the outside of life, in that old world of the
Troubadours, with whom this term is of frequent recurrence.
Return.


PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA

[30] NO account of the Renaissance can be complete without
some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the
fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of
ancient Greece. To reconcile forms of sentiment which at first
sight seem incompatible, to adjust the various products of the
human mind to one another in one many-sided type of intellectual
culture, to give humanity, for heart and imagination to feed upon,
as much as it could possibly receive, belonged to the generous
instincts of that age. An earlier and simpler generation had seen
in the gods of Greece so many malignant spirits, the defeated but
still living centres of the religion of darkness, struggling, not
always in vain, against the kingdom of light. Little by little, as
the natural charm of pagan story reasserted itself over minds