by all the citizens in common) had a profound influence upon their civilization. That new social ideal of civic pride found its way irresistibly into ornament. You could not have had civic pride in anything like the same degree without it.
But Greek civilization did not fall into decay because of the beauty and perfection with which it crowned itself in the public eye, but because of certain underlying evils and misuses in the body politic—in which again slavery and the subjection of women had their share. Greek civilization fell because it failed to recognise the dignity of all human nature; it reserved its sense of dignity for a selected race and class; it failed to recognise the dignity of all true kinds of service, and prided itself in military service alone—in that and in the philosophies and the arts. It built a wonderful temple to its gods, but failed in a very large degree to take into God the whole body of humanity over which it had control. And so, Greek civilization broke up into portions of an unimportant size and perished.
At a later day—and again with the city as centre to its life of self-realisation—we get the great period of the Italian Renaissance, a period in which civic and feudal and ecclesiastical influences alternately jostled and combined.
And out of these three prides arose a wonderfully complex art—tremendously expressive of what life meant for that people. And you got then (for the first time, I think),
