MAGIC AND WONDER
imagination she seems not so much rewarded as tortured.
In the Renaissance there was a conception of virtue which carried with it a belief, if not in a miraculous world in general, at least in a special magic or talisman for the individual. To the Greek mind a virtue was a state, a condition between two extremes, and Renaissance philosophers, piously accepting Aristotle's terms, continued to speak of virtue as a mean. But the imaginative literature of the Renaissance, in which we get the less academic account of life, has a tendency to speak of virtue, not as a quality or condition, but as a thing, to be acquired and possessed. The Renaissance man is not courageous—he has courage; the Renaissance woman is not beautiful—she has beauty. Whether this idea of virtue brought about the belief in a magic or talisman, or whether the
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