For an alumnus of the University it is an especially pleasant honour to be invited to lecture on a foundation which perpetuates the name of one of our best-loved scholars and teachers. Since my subject is classical humanism, I am glad to remember that Professor Alexander began his career as a classical scholar, and something of his characteristic sanity and clear-headedness in the criticism of modern literature may be attributed to his commerce with the ancients. It is a satisfaction to remember also, in an educational world increasingly dominated by gentiles, that the University of Toronto remains a stronghold of...

Some survey of theories of the Renaissance as a whole has been a necessary prelude to concentration on one special phase of it, classical humanism. The complex literary and philosophic tendencies of the Renaissance can be best understood if we regard the humanistic tradition as the central road and other more or less antagonistic movements as departures from that road. With all its changing aspects humanism, in the twelfth century or the fourteenth or the sixteenth, is an essentially homogeneous thing, and before approaching it more closely we might for a moment rise above the clouds of definitions and particulars...

Modern historians, while making the spirit of the Renaissance spread from Italy over the rest of Europe, have regularly contrasted the aesthetic, irreligious neo-paganism of the South with the sober Christian piety of the North. The fundamental change that humanism underwent in crossing the Alps was presumably due to the invincible moral constitution of the northern nations, which were profoundly stimulated by an impulse they rejected. Such a view, so congenial to the Nordic and especially the Anglo-Saxon belief that the Latin peoples are inevitably immoral, has its measure of truth, but even our brief glance at Italian humanism may...

As i have said, I had thought of giving this fourth hour to the general expression of Christian humanism in the imaginative and reflective literature of the English Renaissance, but I changed my mind. Perhaps a wiser change of mind would have been to cut off the fourth hour, since a classic definition of a fugue might be applied to a series of lectures—a composition in the course of which themes come in one by one and people go out two by two. But, as I at least have found already, there is some relief in turning from spacious...