whole
pleasure" of _La Morte d'Arthur_, "standeth in two special points, in
open manslaughter and bold bawdry." The century was hardly out when
Cervantes published his famous and deadly satire on the knight errant.

[Sidenote: Poetry]

But as the tale of chivalry decayed, the old metal was transmuted into
the pure gold of the poetry of Ariosto, Tasso and Spenser. The claim
to reality was abandoned and the poet quite frankly conjured up a
fantastic, fairy world, full of giants and wizards and enchantments and
hippogryphs, and knights of incredible pugnacity who rescue damsels of
miraculous beauty. Well might the Italian, before Luther and Loyola
came to take the joy out of life, lose himself in the honeyed words and
the amorous adventures of the hero who went mad for love. Another
generation, and {693} Tasso must wind his voluptuous verses around a
religious epic. Edmund Spenser, the Puritan and Englishman,
allegorized the whole in such fashion that while the conscience was
soothed by knowing that all the knights and ladies represented moral
virtues or vices, the senses were titillated by mellifluous cadences
and by naked descriptions of the temptations of the Bower of Bliss.
And how British that Queen Elizabeth of England should impersonate the
principal virtues!

Poetry was in the hearts of the people; song was on their lips. The
early spring of Italy came later to the northern latitudes, but when it
did come, it brought with it Marot and Ronsard in France, Wyatt and
Surrey in England. More significant than the output of the greater
poets was the wide distribution of lyric talent. Not a few
compilations of verses offer to the public the songs of many writers,
some of them unknown by name. England, especially, was "a nest of
singing birds," rapturously greeting the dawn, and the rimes were
mostly of "love, whose month is always May." Each songster poured
forth his heart in fresh, frank praise of his mistress's beauty, or in
chiding of her cruelty, or in lamenting her unfaithfulness. There was
something very simple and direct about it all; nothing deeply
psychological until at the very end of the century Shakespeare's
"sugared sonnets" gave his "private friends" something to think about
as well as something to enjoy.

[Sidenote: Wit]

If life could not be all love it could be nearly all laughter. Wit and
humor were appreciated above all things, and Satire awoke to a sense of
her terrible power. Two s