t 1520: the greatest of Scottish poets, called
"The Chaucer of Scotland." He wrote "The Thistle and the Rose," "The
Dance," and "The Golden Targe."

CHAPTER X.

THE BARREN PERIOD BETWEEN CHAUCER AND SPENSER.

Greek Literature. Invention of Printing. Caxton. Contemporary History.
Skelton. Wyatt. Surrey. Sir Thomas More. Utopia, and other Works. Other
Writers.

THE STUDY OF GREEK LITERATURE.

Having thus mentioned the writers whom we regard as belonging to the
period of Chaucer, although some of them, like Henryson and Dunbar,
flourished at the close of the fifteenth century, we reach those of that
literary epoch which may be regarded as the transition state between
Chaucer and the age of Elizabeth: an epoch which, while it produced no
great literary work, and is irradiated by no great name, was, however, a
time of preparation for the splendid advent of Spenser and Shakspeare.

Incident to the dangers which had so long beset the Eastern or Byzantine
Empire, which culminated in the fall of Constantinople--and to the gradual
but steady progress of Western Europe in arts and letters, which made it a
welcome refuge for the imperilled learning of the East--Greek letters came
like a fertilizing flood across the Continent into England. The philosophy
of Plato, the power of the Athenian drama, and the learning of the
Stagyrite, were a new impulse to literature. Before the close of the
fifteenth century, Greek was taught at Oxford, and men marvelled as they
read that "musical and prolific language, that gives a soul to the objects
of sense, and a body to the abstractions of philosophy," a knowledge of
which had been before entirely lost in the West. Thus was perfected what
is known as the revival of letters, when classical learning came to enrich
and modify the national literatures, if it did temporarily retard the
vernacular progress. The Humanists carried the day against the
Obscurantists; and, as scholarship had before consisted in a thorough
knowledge of Latin, it now also included a knowledge of Greek, which
presented noble works of poetry, eloquence, and philosophy, and gave us a
new idiom for the terminologies of science.

INVENTION OF PRINTING.--Nor was this all. This great wealth of learning
would have still remained a dead letter to the multitude, and, in the
main, a useless treasure even to scholars, had it not been for a simple
yet marvellous invention of the same period. In Germany, som