arter, our country would probably have had as happy a history as is
possible to human nature. The Renascence, when it came, would have come
as popular education and not the culture of a club of aesthetics. The New
Learning might have been as democratic as the old learning in the old
days of mediaeval Paris and Oxford. The exquisite artistry of the school
of Cellini might have been but the highest grade of the craft of a
guild. The Shakespearean drama might have been acted by workmen on
wooden stages set up in the street like Punch and Judy, the finer
fulfilment of the miracle play as it was acted by a guild. The players
need not have been "the king's servants," but their own masters. The
great Renascence might have been liberal with its liberal education. If
this be a fancy, it is at least one that cannot be disproved; the
mediaeval revolution was too unsuccessful at the beginning for any one to
show that it need have been unsuccessful in the end. The feudal
parliament prevailed, and pushed back the peasants at least into their
dubious and half-developed status. More than this it would be
exaggerative to say, and a mere anticipation of the really decisive
events afterwards. When Henry VIII. came to the throne the guilds were
perhaps checked but apparently unchanged, and even the peasants had
probably regained ground; many were still theoretically serfs, but
largely under the easy landlordism of the abbots; the mediaeval system
still stood. It might, for all we know, have begun to grow again; but
all such speculations are swamped in new and very strange things. The
failure of the revolution of the poor was ultimately followed by a
counter-revolution; a successful revolution of the rich.

The apparent pivot of it was in certain events, political and even
personal. They roughly resolve themselves into two: the marriages of
Henry VIII. and the affair of the monasteries. The marriages of Henry
VIII. have long been a popular and even a stale joke; and there is a
truth of tradition in the joke, as there is in almost any joke if it is
sufficiently popular, and indeed if it is sufficiently stale. A jocular
thing never lives to be stale unless it is also serious. Henry was
popular in his first days, and even foreign contemporaries give us quite
a glorious picture of a young prince of the Renascence, radiant with all
the new accomplishments. In his last days he was something very like a
maniac; he no longer inspired love, and even