etter informed than
Sleidan, or as objective. For the first and only time he really
combined the two genres then obtaining, the humanistic and the
ecclesiastical. He is not blind to some of the cultural achievements
of the Reformation. One of the things for which he praises Luther most
is for ornamenting and enriching the German language. Sleidan's faults
are those of his age. He dared not break the old stiff division of the
subject by years. He put in a number of insignificant facts, such as
the flood of the Tiber and the explosion of ammunition dumps, nor was
he above a superstitious belief in the effects of eclipses and in
monsters. He cited documents broadly and on the whole fairly, but not
with painstaking accuracy. He offered nothing on the causes leading up
to the Reformation, nor on the course of the development of {588}
Protestantism, nor on the characters of its leaders nor on the life and
thought of the people. But he wrote fluently, acceptably to his
public, and temperately.

On the whole, save for Baronius, the Catholics had less to offer of
notable histories than had the Protestants. A _succes de scandale_ was
won by Nicholas Sanders' [Sidenote: Sanders 1585] _Origin and Progress
of the English Schism_. Among the nasty bits of gossip with which "Dr.
Slanders," as he was called, delighted to regale his audience, some are
absurd, such as that Anne Boleyn was Henry VIII's daughter. As the
books from which he says he took these anecdotes are not extant, it is
impossible to gauge how far he merely copied from others and how far he
gave rein to his imagination.

[Sidenote: Loyola]

The one brilliant bit of Catholic church history that was written in
the sixteenth century is the autobiography of Ignatius Loyola, dictated
by him to Lewis Gonzalez [Sidenote: 1553-6] and taken down partly in
Spanish and partly in Italian. The great merit of this narrative is
its insight into the author's own character gained by long years of
careful self-observation. Its whole emphasis is psychological, on the
inner struggle and not on the outward manifestations of saintliness,
such as visions. It was taken over in large part verbatim in
Ribadeneira's biography of Loyola. Compared to it, all other attempts
at ecclesiastical biography in the sixteenth century, notably the lives
of Luther by the Catholic Cochlaeus and by the Protestant Mathesius,
lag far in the dusty rear.

SECTION 3. POLITICAL THEORY

[Siden