d climate as determinant
influences.

[Sidenote: English chronicles]

It is hard to see any value, save occasionally as sources, in the
popular English chronicles of Edward Hall, Raphael Hollinshed and John
Stow. Full of court gossip and of pageantry, strongly royalist,
conservative and patriotic, they reflect the interests of the
middle-class cockney as faithfully as does a certain type of newspaper
and magazine today.

[Sidenote: Biographies]

The biography and autobiography were cultivated with considerable
success. Jovius and Brantome both wrote series of lives of eminent men
and women. Though the essays of Erasmus in this direction are both few
and brief, they are notable as among the most exquisite pen-portraits
in literature. More ambitious and more notable were the _Lives of the
Best Painters, Sculptors and Architects_ by George Vasari, in which the
whole interest was personal and practical, with no attempt to write a
history or a philosophy of art. Even criticism was confined almost
entirely to {583} variations of praise. In the realm of autobiography
Benvenuto Cellini attained to the _non plus ultra_ of self-revelation.
If he discloses the springs of a rare artistic genius, with equal
naivete he lays bare a ruffianly character and a colossal egotism.

[Sidenote: Church history]

One immense field of human thought and action had been all but totally
ignored by the humanist historians--that of religion. To cultivate
this field a new genre, church history, sprang into being, though the
felt want was not then for a rational explanation of important and
neglected phenomena, but for material which each side in the religious
controversy might forge into weapons to use against the other. The
natural result of so practical a purpose was that history was studied
through colored spectacles, and was interpreted with strong tendency.
In the most honest hands, such as those of Sleidan, the scale was
unconsciously weighted on one side; by more passionate or less
honorable advocates it was deliberately lightened with suppression of
the truth on one side and loaded with suggestion of the false on the
other.

If the mutual animosity of Catholic and Protestant narrowed history,
their common detestation of all other religions than Christianity, as
well as of all heresies and skepticisms, probably impoverished it still
more. Orthodox Christianity, with its necessary preparation, ancient
Judaism, was set apart as