Changing prejudice often inverts the value of words while preserving most of their sense; virtues are turned into vices, artistic qualities become defects.

The modern tendency towards increasing specialization in all branches of research and scholarship has discouraged comparative studies of the arts; and what we seldom do we generally distrust. But our distrust of analogies was not shared by the sixteenth century, which inherited from antiquity a habit of drawing parallels as a matter of course.