iority. Among a people that stands in awe of
learning--and this is more true of Europe than of America and was more
true of the sixteenth than it is of the twentieth century--a classical
education offers a man exceptional facilities for delicately impressing
inferiors with their crudity.

[Sidenote: Vernaculars]

The period that marked high water in the estimation of the classics,
also saw the turn of the tide. In all countries the vernacular crowded
the classics ever backward from the field. The conscious cultivation
of the modern tongues was marked by the publication of new dictionaries
and by various works such as John Bale's history of English literature,
written itself, to be sure, in Latin. The finest work of the kind was
{579} Joachim du Bellay's _Defence et Illustration de la langue
francaise_ published in 1549 as part of a concerted effort to raise
French as a vehicle of poetry and prose to a level with the classics.
This was done partly by borrowing from Latin. One of the
characteristic words of the sixteenth century, "patrie," was thus
formally introduced.

SECTION 2. HISTORY

For the examination of the interests and temper of a given era, hardly
any better gauge can be found than the history it produced. In the
period under consideration there were two great schools, or currents,
of historiography, the humanistic, sprung from the Renaissance, and
church history, the child of the Reformation.

[Sidenote: Humanistic school of historiography]

The devotees of the first illustrate most aptly what has just been said
about the influence of the classics. Their supreme interest was style,
generally Latin. To clothe a chronicle in the toga of Livy's periods,
to deck it out with the rhetoric of Sallust and to stitch on a few
antitheses and epigrams in the manner of Tacitus, seemed to them the
height of art. Their choice of matter was as characteristic as their
manner, in that their interest was exclusively political and
aristocratic. Save the doings of courts and camps, the political
intrigues of governments and the results of battles, together with the
virtues and vices of the rulers, they saw little in history. What the
people thought, felt and suffered, was beyond their purview. Nor did
most of them have much interest in art, science or literature, or even
in religion. When George Buchanan, a man in the thick of the Scottish
Reformation, who drafted the _Book of Articles_, came to write the