vement has been going on in religion and philosophy, society
and politics,--a movement of destruction typified by Voltaire and
Rousseau, and a constructive movement represented by Diderot and
Lessing. We are still living in the midst of this great epoch: the
questions which it presents are liable to disturb our prejudices as well
as to stimulate our reason; the results to which it must sooner or
later attain can now be only partially foreseen; and even its present
tendencies are generally misunderstood, and in many quarters wholly
ignored. With the sixteenth century, as we have said, the case is far
different. The historical problem is far less complex. The issues at
stake are comparatively simple, and the historian has before him a
straightforward story.

From the dramatic, or rather from the epic, point of view, the sixteenth
century is pre-eminent. The essentially transitional character of modern
history since the breaking up of the papal and feudal systems is at no
period more distinctly marked. In traversing the sixteenth century we
realize that we have fairly got out of one state of things and into
another. At the outset, events like the challenge of Barletta may make
us doubt whether we have yet quite left behind the Middle Ages. The
belief in the central position of the earth is still universal, and the
belief in its rotundity not yet, until the voyage of Magellan, generally
accepted. We find England--owing partly to the introduction of gunpowder
and the consequent disuse of archery, partly to the results of the
recent integration of France under Louis XI.--fallen back from the
high relative position which it had occupied under the rule of
the Plantagenets; and its policy still directed in accordance with
reminiscences of Agincourt, and garnet, and Burgundian alliances. We
find France just beginning her ill-fated career of intervention in the
affairs of Italy; and Spain, with her Moors finally vanquished and a new
world beyond the ocean just added to her domain, rapidly developing
into the greatest empire which had been seen since the days of the first
Caesars. But at the close of the century we find feudal life in castles
changed into modern life in towns; chivalric defiances exchanged for
over-subtle diplomacy; Maurices instead of Bayards; a Henry IV. instead
of a Gaston de Foix. We find the old theory of man's central position in
the universe--the foundation of the doctrine of final causes and of the
whole th