ent to leave the glory of life to
their superiors. They saw no reason why all the good things should be
preserved like game for the nobles to hunt, or inclosed like commons,
for the pasturage of a few aristocratic mutton-heads. So in literature
they were quite content to let the fastidious gentry read their fill of
poetry about knights wandering in fairy-lands forlorn, while they
themselves devoured books about humbler heroes. The Picaresque novel
in Spain and its counterparts, Till Eulenspiegel or Reinecke Vos in the
north, told the adventures of some rascal or vagabond. Living by his
wits he found it a good life to cheat and to gamble, to drink and to
make love.

[Sidenote: Plays]

For those who could not concentrate on a book, there was the drama.
From the Middle Ages, when the play was a vehicle of religious
instruction, it developed in the period of the Renaissance into a
completely secular mirror of life. In Italy there was an exquisite
literary drama, turning on some plot of love or tale of seduction, and
there was alongside of this a popular sort of farce known as the
Commedia dell' Arte, in which only the outline of the plot was
sketched, and the characters, usually typical persons as the Lover, his
Lady, the Bragging Captain, the Miser, would fill in the dialogue and
such comic "business" as tickled the fancy of the audience.

Somewhat akin to these pieces in spirit were the {696} Shrovetide
Farces written in Germany by the simple Nuremberger who describes
himself in the verses, literally translatable:

Hans Sachs is a shoe-
Maker and poet, too.

The people, always moral, delighted no less in the rough fun of these
artless scenes than in the apothegms and sound advice in which they
abounded.

[Sidenote: The spirit of the Sixteenth Century]

The contrast of two themes much in the thought of men, typifies the
spirit of the age. The one motiv is loud at the beginning of the
Reformation but almost dies away before the end of the century; the
other, beginning at the same time, rises slowly into a crescendo
culminating far beyond the boundaries of the age. The first theme was
the Prodigal Son, treated by no less than twenty-seven German
dramatists, not counting several in other languages. To the
Protestant, the Younger Son represented faith, the Elder Son works. To
all, the exile in the far country, the riotous living with harlots and
the feeding on husks with swine, meant the life of this wor