Michelet's resonant "discovery by mankind of himself and of the world" rather expresses what a man of the Renaissance himself must have thought it, than what we in this age can declare it to be.

But both endeavours to date and to define are alike impossible.

One cannot fix a term to day or night, and the theory of the Renaissance as a kind of tropical dawn--a sudden passage to light from darkness--is not to be considered.

The Renaissance was, and was the result of, a numerous and various series of events which followed and accompanied one another from the fourteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth centuries.

First and most immediate in its influence on art and literature and thought, was the rediscovery of the ancient literatures.