366 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN 



a disciplined and nobly expansive people thought themselves 

 for a moment on the pinnacle of felicity. 



While the English were thus becoming a powerful and 

 self-conscious nation, those intellectual changes which divided 

 the mediaeval from the modern period, and which we know 

 by the names of Renaissance and Reformation, took place. 

 It is a peculiarity of this transition time in our islands, that 

 what used to be called 'the new learning,' with its new 

 theories of education, its new way of regarding nature, and 

 its new conceptions of human life, was introduced simultane- 

 ously with the Reformation. Italy had accomplished the 

 Revival of Learning ; Germany had revolted against Catholic- 

 ism. France had felt both movements unequally and partially, 

 amid the confusion of civil wars and the clash of contending 

 sects. Italy, after the Tridentine Council, was relapsing into 

 reactionary dulness. Germany was dismembered by strifes 

 and schisms. France underwent the throes of a passionate 

 struggle, which subordinated the intellectual aspects of both 

 Renaissance and Reformation to political interest. England 

 alone, meanwhile, enjoyed the privilege of receiving that two- 

 fold influx of the modern spirit without an overwhelming 

 strain upon her vital forces. The Marian persecution was 

 severe enough to test the bias of the people, and to remind 

 them of the serious points at issue, without rending society 

 to its foundations. Humanism reached our shores when its 

 first enthusiasms enthusiasms which seemed in Italy to have 

 brought again the gods and vices of the pagan past had 

 tempered their delirium. We have only to compare men like 

 More, Ascham, Colet, Buchanan, Camden, Cheke, the pioneers 

 of our Renaissance, with Filelfo, Poggio, Poliziano, Pontano, 

 in order to perceive how far more sober and healthy was the 

 tone of the new learning in Great Britain than in Italy. 



In this connection it is worthy of notice that humanism, 

 before it moulded the minds of the English, had already 

 permeated Italian and French literature. Classical erudition 

 had been adapted to the needs of modern thought. Antique 

 authors had been collected, printed, annotated, and translated. 

 They were fairly mastered in the south, and assimilated to 



