soldiers of Cortez and Pizarro, spread over Europe. The effect of these travellers' tales was to stimulate the imagination. The real and the fabulous became confused. To the excited sailor a manatee upright in the sea nursing its young seemed a mermaid; classic myth has nothing more monstrous than the giant octopus; and Prester John himself is no more improbable than Montezuma. Our geography is defined and exact, and illustrated with photographs; theirs had all the fascination of mystery, the intoxication of danger, and the lure of romance. Yet, owing to the fact that the significance of the discovery was not appreciated for a long time, the effect upon the imagination was of gradual growth, and for the first half of the sixteenth century it is rather a general than a specific cause of literary inspiration. Not until the generation of Spenser and Shakespeare and Raleigh is it possible to cite concrete illustrations of its working. To them all truth seemed unconfined and the human mind free to wander at will. The line dividing fact from fancy became almost obliterated. As Spenser playfully argues, Faeryland is no more unreal than America.1

Right well I wote most mighty Soueraine,
That all this famous antique history,

Of some th' abundance of an idle braine

Will iudged be, and painted forgery,
Rather then matter of iust memory,

Sith none, that breatheth liuing aire, does know,
Where is that happy land of Færy,

Which I so much do vaunt, yet no where show,
But vouch antiquities, which no body can know

But let that man with better sence aduize,
That of the world least part to vs is red:
And dayly how through hardy enterprize,
Many great Regions are discourered,
Which to late age were neuer mentioned.
Who euer heard of th' Indian Peru?

Or who in venturous vessell measured
The Amazons huge river now found trew?

Or fruitfullest Virginia who did euer vew?

Yet all these were, when no man did them know;

Yet haue from wisest ages hidden beene:

And later times things more unknowne shall show.

1 The Faerie Queene, Spenser, Bk. ii, Prologue, Oxford, 1909.

1

Why then should witlesse man so much misweene

That nothing is, but that which he hath seene?
What if within the Moones faire shining spheare?
What if in euery other starre unseene

Of other worldes he happily should heare?

He wonder would much more: yet such to some appeare.

As Spenser here implies, this stimulation was not limited to questions dealing only with material subjects; it passed over also into the spiritual realm. Hamlet's retort,

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy,

is characteristic of the age. The old limits, grown hard and fixed through the centuries, were broken and the imagination grew with the wonders it fed on. Literature, which without this third factor might have been confined to close analysis such as is the Prince of Macchiavelli, became broad as life itself.

And, as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

At this critical moment in the development of Europe when these three great ideas were to change to the smallest detail the outlook on life, came the invention of printing by movable type. Previously the number of books had been few and the texts inaccurate. The catalogue of the library of Oriel College in 1375 lists only one hundred items, and yet this was a famous collection. Chaucer's scholar dreams of twenty! By this new method books became accessible to the many and the texts were based upon the collation of manuscripts. Still more, a new work could spread over Europe in a comparatively short time. The all-pervasiveness of the printed page today has obscured for most of us the importance of the press in our daily life; like the air we breathe we are conscious of it only when something goes wrong. Although the old proverb, Vita sine libris est mortis imago, would relegate the great mass of medieval life to the mortuary, yet our modern life is dependent to a very great degree upon our mental contact

with our fellows. Progress is due not so much to the individual but to the united effort of all working in the same field, a condition which implies that the individual must himself be conscious of his fellow workmen. Such unity of thought as is here required is given by the press. Without its invention the other three factors would have operated, doubtless, and in time man's spirit would have been freed. But without question the time would have been incomparably longer. As it was, the invention of printing came at a time when man was full of utterance and by it his voice was carried everywhere. It was in vain that laws were passed against the influx of the Lutheran heresy; in vain that Calvin was condemned; Tyndall's Bible, printed in the Netherlands, found its way to all parts of England. The Devil had to be fought with fire, and the greater proportion of More's works are controversial and in English. Even the King himself was forced to enter the arena. By the invention of the press the nation was rendered sensitive to every fresh current of thought. Public opinion was created, a fact that explains the position of Erasmus and the power of Aretino. And finally, by the reaction of mind on mind due to its agency, is evolved the modern man.

Such is the Renaissance, the re-birth. Of course the term is a misnomer, in that life is necessarily continuous and these four factors operated through an extended period of time. Yet it makes the sixteenth century a period set apart. As Wordsworth says of the cataclysmic years of the French Revolution,

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive;

But to be young was very heaven. O times
In which the meager, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute took at once
The attraction of a country in romance.

so here there was the same receptibility of impression. As in the life of an individual it is platitudinous to say that the clock does measure his life, so a nation or a race seems at some times to live more intensely than at others. The long, slow, fat years of peaceful sloth are followed by others of great intellectual activity and of strenuous intellectual endeavor. Such a time was the Renaissance. By the four great factors, which have just been outlined, all men were affected—but they were not affected equally by all factors,

nor all by any one factor to an equal degree. One man might be interested in the humanistic revival, but might believe that scientific interests were negligible and that the Reformation was the work of unlettered barbarians; whereas another, equally sincere and equally of the age, might feel that the Rome of Leo was the Beast of Revelations and Leo himself the incarnate Anti-Christ. The Renaissance seems to consist of a bewildering variety of brilliant individuals, with nothing in common except that the characteristics of each are described with a superlative. Great saints, Saint Theresa; great sinners, Cesar Borgia; great thinkers, Macchiavelli; great scientists, Copernicus; great scholars, Budeus; great artists, Leonardo; great poets, Ariosto; great knights, Bayard; great blaggards, Aretino. Names at hazard throng the mind, each a vivid personality and one which the world has not forgotten. The same paradoxical contrast may be found even within the limits of a single life. More, who has been beatified, argued for religious toleration, wore a haircloth shirt and prided himself on persecuting heretics. Henry, the Defender of the Faith, was the first Protestant king of England. There is no need to pile up instances. Forces that had been accumulating for centuries had broken loose, swirling in a mighty whirlpool and engulfing all. But the effect of the forces on any individual varied according to his temperament and according to the time. What is true of one man is not necessarily true of another; what is true of one man at a certain time is not necessarily true of the same man at another time. The total result is bewildering because each particle is in constant motion,-and therein lies the fascination of the study.

Up to this point the general reasoning, with a change in dating, would be applicable to any of the European countries, and the illustrations might have been drawn from any one of them. When the reasoning is narrowed specifically to England, however, still another factor is introduced, the social conditions there, because literature like every other commodity obeys the laws of supply and demand. The buyer buys the book because he wishes to read it; he wishes to read it because he finds it interesting. The popularity of a book in any given section is, therefore, a direct indication of the state of mind of the people in that section. Conversely, since an author composes in the expectation that his work will be

read, the kind of work done is conditioned by the public state of mind. However true this statement of the relationship between the author and his public is now, the same statement holds to a still greater degree in the Renaissance. Men of education, namely both the writers and the readers, tended automatically to collect around a court, and in each court there was a definite literary public and literary opinion. Each Italian state, for example, produced a local school, which differed in its output from the others. The Neapolitan differs from the Tuscan, the Tuscan from the Ferrarese, etc., and it is not until the Spanish domination, after 1530, that the writers lose their distinguishing characteristics in the bathos of Petrarchan imitation. In England also, so far as it is a question of formal literature, it was limited to court circles. London dominates. In the first place, the country was so scantily populated that it attracted the attention of the Italian Traveller.1

I rode, as your Magnificence knows, from Dover to London, and from London to Oxford, a distance of more than 200 Italian miles, and it seemed to me to be very thinly inhabited; but, lest the way I went with your Magnificence should have differed from the other parts of the country, I enquired of those who rode to the north of the kingdom, i. e. to the borders of Scotland, and was told that it was the same case there; nor was there any variety in the report of those who went to Bristol and into Cornwall.

His observation is supported by modern researches. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, York had declined "in inhabitants as well as in position and wealth." 2 By 1547 the number of people in Plymouth had fallen from the medieval count over fifty per cent.3 The great western and central cities, with the exception of Bristol, are relatively modern. Clearly war and the plague had done their work. In the second place, not only were the provinces less important, but, measured in time, they were more distant. For example, in 1515 the Venetian ambassador spent a day on the road between Dover and Canterbury. Travelling was not only incommodious, it was also dangerous. Small parties slowly pick

4

4 R. Brown, Four Years at the Court of Henry VIII, I, 60. For the general condition, cf. the long note in Croft's edition of Elyot's Gouernour, ii, 81-84, where the legislative acts are given.