With Petrarch the same genius reached forth across the gulf of darkness, resuming the tradition of a splendid past.

With Boccaccio the same genius proclaimed the beauty of the world, the goodliness of youth and strength and love and life, unterrified by hell, unappalled by the shadow of impending death.
It was now, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, when Italy had lost indeed the heroic spirit which we admire in her Communes of the thirteenth, but had gained instead ease, wealth, magnificence, and that repose which springs from long prosperity, that the new age at last began.

Europe was, as it were, a fallow field, beneath which lay buried the civilization of the old world.

Behind stretched the centuries of mediaevalism, intellectually barren and inert.

Of the future there were as yet but faint foreshadowings.