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28 them to celebrate. As a philosopher might put it, the dominion of the external gives place to the dominion of the internal.

The period we are wont to call the Renaissance appears, then, to be in certain respects a period of weakening and decline. And if Italy would return to a life more intense and more energetic than that which now she leads amid verbal pyrotechnics and the academic discourses of Parliament, she must resolutely expel the dangerous maladies which the Renaissance introduced into her blood, must return to deeper and more bitter springs, must forget the lust of ornament and the delights of rhetoric, must set herself to action rather than to speech, to new achievement rather than to admiration.

Such thoughts as these might well be suggested by the centenary of Leon Battista Alberti if such occasions, instead of serving merely for the display of erudition and municipal vanity, really led us to seek the essential message and the continuing inspiration of the great men they celebrate.

For Alberti signifies the passage from the heroic, active life of the Middle Ages to the graceful, wordy epoch that ensued, and illustrates, even more clearly than Petrarch or Leonardo, that softening of the conceptions of life which was to lead at last to the spiritual degeneration of the seventeenth century. He is indeed, to