Prodigal as seemed the expenditure of intellectual effort, there was a practical economy in its application. In the result its ripest fruit was stimulating and lasting, more stimulating and lasting than any which came of the more rigid specialism of later epochs.

Versatility of great Englishmen of the epoch.

More and Ralegh, Sidney and Spenser, Bacon and Shakespeare, all pertinently illustrate the versatility of the age, the bold digressiveness of its intellectual and imaginative endeavour. To varying extents omniscience was the foible of all and carried with it. the inevitable penalties. Each set foot in more numerous and varied tracts of knowledge than any one man could thoroughly explore. They treated of many subjects, of the real significance of which they obtained only the faintest and haziest glimpse. The breadth of their intellectual ambitions at times impoverished their achievement. The splendid gifts of Sidney and Ralegh were indeed largely wasted in too wide and multifarious a range of work. They did a strange variety of things to admiration, but failed to do the one thing of isolated pre-eminence which might have rewarded efficient concentration of effort. Shakespeare's intellectual capacity seems as catholic in range as Leonardo da Vinci's, and laws that apply to other men hardly apply to him, but there were tracts of knowledge, outside even Shakespeare's province, on which he trespassed unwisely. His handling of themes of law, geography, and scholarship, proves that in his case, as in that of smaller men, there were limits of knowledge beyond which it was perilous for him to stray. With greater insolence Bacon wrote of astronomy without putting himself to the trouble of apprehending the solar system of Copernicus, and misinterpreted other branches of science from lack of special knowledge. But in the case of Bacon and Shakespeare, such errors are spots on the sun.

As interpreter in drama of human nature Shakespeare has no rival; nor indeed among prophets of science has any other shown Bacon's magnanimity or eloquence. Although nature had amply endowed them with the era's universality of intellectual interests, she had also given them the power of demonstrating the full force of their rare genius in a particular field of effort. It was there that each reached

the highest pinnacle of glory.

III

The transi

aspect of the

century.

In a sense the sixteenth century was an age of transition, of transition from the ancient to the modern world, from the age of darkness and superstition to the age of light and scientific knowledge. A mass of newly tional discovered knowledge lay at its disposal, but so large a mass that succeeding centuries had to be enlisted in the service of digesting it and co-ordinating it. When the sixteenth century opened, the aspects of human life had recently undergone revolution. The old established theories of man and the world had been refuted, and much time was required for the evolution of new theories that should be workable, and fill the vacant places. The new problems were surveyed with eager interest and curiosity, but were left to the future for complete solution. The scientific spirit, which is the life of the modern world, was conceived in the sixteenth century; it came to birth later.

Its

The causes of the intellectual awakening which distinguished sixteenth century Europe lie on the surface. primary mainsprings are twofold. On the one Primary hand a distant past had been suddenly unveiled, of the and there had come to light an ancient literature awakening. and an ancient philosophy which proved the human intellect

causes

to possess capacities hitherto unimagined. On the other hand, the dark curtains which had hitherto restricted man's view of the physical world to a small corner of it were torn asunder, and the strange fact was revealed that that which had hitherto been regarded by men as the whole sphere of physical life and nature, was in reality a mere fragment of a mighty universe of which there had been no previous conception.

of the

Of the two revelations-that of man's true intellectual capacity and that of the true extent of his physical environ The priority ment--the intellectual revelation came first. The intellectual physical revelation followed at no long interval. It was an accidental conjuncture of events. But each powerfully reacted on the other, and increased its fertility of effect.

revelation.

It was the discovery anew by Western Europe of classical Greek literature and philosophy which was the spring of the

intellectual revelation of the Renaissance. That The discovery of Greek discovery was begun in the fourteenth century, literature when Greek subjects of the falling Byzantine emand philosophy. pire brought across the Adriatic manuscript memorials of Greek intellectual culture. But it was not till the final overthrow of the Byzantine empire by the Turks that all that survived of the literary art of Athens was driven westward in a flood, and the whole range of Greek enlightenment the highest enlightenment that had yet dawned in the human mind-lay at the disposal of Western Europe. It was then there came for the first time into the modern world the feeling for form, the frank delight in life and the senses, the unrestricted employment of the reason, with every other enlightened aspiration that was enshrined in Attic literature and philosophy. Under the growing Greek influence, all shapes of literature and speculation, of poetry

and philosophy, sprang into new life in Italy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the sixteenth cen

influence.

tury the torch was handed on by Italy to Spain, The France, Germany, and England. In each of those Italian countries the light developed in accord with the national idiosyncrasy, but in none of them did it wholly lose the Italian hue, which it acquired at its first coming into Western Europe. It was mainly through Florence that the newly released stream of Hellenism flowed northwards.

The

revelation.

From another quarter than the East came, a little later, the physical revelation which helped no less to mould the spirit of the era. Until the extreme end of the fifteenth century, man knew nothing of the true physical shape or extent of the planet on which his life was cast. Fantastic theories of cosmography had been evolved, to which no genuine test had been applied. It was only in the year 1492 that Western Europe first learned its real place on the world's surface. The maritime explorations which distinguished the decade 1490-1500 unveiled new expanses of land and sea which reduced to insignificance the fragments of earth and heaven with which men had hitherto been familiar.

Maritime

tion.

To the west was brought to light for the first time a continent larger than the whole area of terrestrial matter of which there was previous knowledge. To the south a Portuguese mariner discovered that Africa, explorawhich was hitherto deemed to be merely a narrow strip of earth forming the southern boundary wall of the world, was a gigantic peninsula thrice the size of Europe, which stretched far into a southern ocean, into the same ocean which washed the shores of India.

Such discoveries were far more than contributions to the

The discovery of the solar system.

science of geography. They were levers to lift the spirit of man into unlooked-for altitudes. They gave new conceptions not of earth alone, but of heaven. The skies were surveyed from points of view which had never yet been approached. A trustworthy study of the sun and stars became possible, and in the early years of the sixteenth century, a scientific investigator deduced from the rich array of new knowledge the startling truth that the earth, hitherto believed to be the centre of the universe, was only one-and that not the largest-of numerous planetary bodies rotating around the sun. If Columbus and Vasco da Gama, the discoverers of new lands and seas, deserve homage for having first revealed the true dimensions of the earth, to Copernicus is due the supreme honour of having taught the inhabitants of the earth to know their just place in the economy of the limitless firmament, over which they had hitherto fancied that they ruled. Whatever final purpose sun, planets and stars served, it was no longer possible to regard them as mere ministers of light and heat to men on earth.

The expan

sion of thought.

So stupendous was the expansion of the field of man's thought, which was generated by the efforts of Columbus and Copernicus, that only gradually was its full significance apprehended. All branches of human endeavour and human speculation were ultimately remodelled in the light of the new physical revelation. The change was in the sixteenth century only beginning. But new ideals at once came to birth, and new applications of human energy suggested themselves in every direction.

Dreamers believed that a new universe had been born, and that they were destined to begin a new manner of human life, which should be freed from the defects of the old. The intellectual revelation of a new culture_power