is apt to be a prig, and there is not a little priggishness in the early sixteenth century; when he is stupid he is apt to be a lump; when humorous somewhat horseplayful; when unamiable a bully and a brute. Neither will these well-known characteristics be wanting in a not too forced carrying out of the parallel.

But if we look at the actual production of the time, there is not much room for grumbling. We have almost got rid of the dead-weight of pedantry which oppressed the fifteenth century, of the cumbrous trappings and creaking wheels of its overloaded style. The nightmare of its allegory is being transformed into a Queen Mab, sometimes positively, and always comparatively, beneficent. Its satire, with Saint Lucian (not the saint whose day is the 8th of January) to help, is in the same way being transformed from the tone of the Jeremiad to the tone of the Polite Conversation. Moralities thirty thousand lines long have given place to farce, and are giving way to comedy and tragedy and history and drame. The nouvelle is ubiquitous, and the novel is almost in sight. Above all, people are beginning to take a national interest in their own language and their own literature—to determine to write "English matters in the English tongue for English men," mutatis mutandis; to think of adorning the Sparta that has fallen to their lot. No doubt there are dangers in this as there are in everything; no doubt it leads in time to a most undesirable cutting of literary communications between nation and nation, which becomes worse as the cultivation of

the common tongue of Latin for literary purposes becomes more and more unusual. But its advantages far outweigh its defects, and the vernaculars are, in consequence of it, put in a fair way to develop, after a fashion which would have been simply impossible if the medieval solidarity had continued, and which, in the case of some languages, though probably not of English, is likely to be rather hampered than helped by any restoration of general international literary comity. In other words, the great literatures are now fairly launched, or on the point of having the dogshores knocked away, that they may sail the oceanirremeable certainly, perhaps illimitable-qua cursum

ventus.

Nor do they sail under any mean or evil auspices, or without cheering circumstance, but, on the contrary

"With sound of pleasant music, and dancing on the deck."

If we have just denied the highest and rarest charm to Ariosto, only that can be denied him. For varied. grace, for infinite faculty of pastime, for curious and yet never over-laboured art, for the provision of a standard of a certain order of poetical narration, which none has ever excelled and few have even for moments reached, he has no fellow in literature. There is nobody before him, save Chaucer, of anything like his peculiar quality; after him hundreds try to attain it, and most fail. The "width and wisdom" of Rabelais-at least as wise as he is "broad," though nearly

as broad as he is wise-give an equally unique combination we know that here, also, the period may be secure; no after-age is likely to surpass it in this special blending. It is the glory of Erasmus, independently of the actual merit and attraction of his performance, to show us, almost as uniquely, that scholarship may free itself from almost every touch of the pedantry, the one-sidedness, the churlish arrogance and rusticity, by which it is too commonly accompanied, and which were then its almost inseparable companions-to show that a Reformer may be considerate, a critic genial, an enemy of credulity not destitute of sincere belief. Luther, the inferior of his great forerunner in some points, but his superior in strength, in courage, and masculine character, vindicates Protestantism from the charge of necessarily leading to the Puritan Avernus, and contrives to infuse, into a rough polemic, humour, learning, and a certain kindliness. Even Calvin, of whom as a man the less said the better, is as a man of letters, from the formal, and not merely the formal, side, worthy to rank among all but the greatest. And among his fellows of this second rank there are not only crowds of Italians in almost every style, from Bembo and La Casa and Castiglione to Folengo and Berni, but Marot and Marguerite, Wyatt and Surrey and Ascham, the wicked wits of the Obscuri and the homely wisdom, not quite untuneful withal, of Hans Sachs, the sugared exquisiteness of Johannes Secundus, the admired and really admirable imitative faculty of Buchanan. Of such jewels no Cornelia need

be ashamed: yet once more, and for the last time, let it be said, the greatest pride of the age should rather lie perhaps in the all but universal diffusion of love for literature, and effort in it, of determination to leave the estate of the world in matters literary better at the end than at the beginning.

Ascham, 18, 102, 171, 232, 251, 253, Bonefonius, 47.