Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. III.djvu/135

109 ARMIES ON THE GARI GUANO. 109 augmented by all the appliances of ingenuity and chapter • XIV industry ; whose cities were crowded with magnifi- ^— cent and costly works of public utility ; into whose ports every wind that blew wafted the rich freights of distant climes ; whose thousand hills were cov- ered to their very tops with the golden labors of the husbandman ; and whose intellectual developement showed itself, not only in a liberal scholarship far outstripping that of their contemporaries, but in works of imagination, and of elegant art more par- ticularly, which rivalled the best days of antiquity. The period before us, indeed, the commencement of the sixteenth century, was that of their meridian splendor, when Italian genius, breaking through the cloud which had temporarily obscured its early dawn, shone out in full effulgence ; for we are now touching on the age of Machiavelli, Ariosto, and Mi- chael Angelo, — the golden age of Leo the Tenth. It is impossible, even at this distance of time, to contemplate without feelings of sadness the fate of such a country, thus suddenly converted into an arena for the bloody exhibitions of the gladiators of Europe ; to behold her trodden under foot by the very nations on whom she had freely poured the light of civilization ; to see the fierce soldiery of Europe, from the Danube to the Tagus, sweeping like an army of locusts over her fields, defiling her pleasant places, and raising the shout of battle, or of brutal triumph under the shadow of those monuments of genius, which have been the delight and despair of succeeding ages. It was the old story of the Goths and Vandals acted over again. Those more refined