JUN 12 1899 CAMBRIDGE, MASS. ORTENSIO LANDO, A HUMORIST OF THE RENAISSANCE. BY WILLIAM E. A. AXON, F.R.S.L. [Read January 11th, 1899.] THE Renaissance-the period of the revolt of the human intellect against the formalism and benumbing spirit of authority that dominated the Middle Ages, the period when the buried literature and art of the ancient world was recovered, the period when human daring and ingenuity discovered a world beyond the sea and worlds beyond the sky, when Columbus and Copernicus, the humanists and the reformers, were filling the minds of men with new and transforming forces in every department of human thought and action-was necessarily a time favourable for the development of individuality and strongly marked character. Popes, princes, scholars, warriors, pass in stately procession, some stained with many crimes and vices, some endowed with magnificent talents, but all instinct with exuberant individuality. To the later stages of this wonderful movement belongs Lando. His first book was not printed until some years after the sack of Rome, and he disappears from our view in the middle of the sixteenth century, VOL. XX. 15 |