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Rh gentleness of our sedentary culture has led us to love and admire the extraordinary century that witnessed our undoing and initiated our deepest decadence. The Quattrocento marks the transition from the active, original, rough, strong civilization of the Middle Ages to the verbal, imitative, insincere, pacific civilization of the succeeding centuries. In the Quattrocento the man of action yields to the man of words; the book takes the place of the sword; the fortress becomes a villa garden; skeptical dilettanteism casts out faith. Great words win honor such as hitherto had been accorded to great deeds alone. Achievement ended, men tell of past achievement. Art and literature, which had served for the expression of spiritual energy, become clever means of acquiring fame and power.

The man who knew little of letters but was strong in body and austere in spirit, the conqueror of kingdoms, the governor of cities, gives way to the insinuating humanist; and the humanist, grown lean in the study of Cicero, admiring strenuous deeds in safe seclusion, becomes the historian of the past and the prophet of the future, but has neither the wit nor the power to act in the present. To a civilization of muscles, stone, and iron, there succeeds a civilization of nerves, pens, and papers. There are poets a-plenty for the writing of pæans, but there are no heroes for