n among the courtiers of
Juan II. of Castile. One of them, Baena, writes as follows of poetry:
"that it cannot be learned or well and properly known, save by the man
of very deep and subtle invention, and of a very lofty and fine
discretion, and of a very healthy and unerring judgment, and such a one
must have seen and heard and read many and diverse books and writings,
and know all languages and have frequented kings' Courts and associated
with great men and beheld and taken part in worldly affairs; and finally
he must be of gentle birth, courteous and sedate, polished, humorous,
polite, witty, and have in his composition honey, and sugar, and salt,
and a good presence and a witty manner of reasoning; moreover he must be
also a lover and ever make a show and pretence of it[75]." Such a
catalogue of the poet's requisites might have been written by any one of
our Oxford euphuists; and Watson, at least, among them fulfilled all its
conditions.

[75] Butler Clarke, _Spanish Literature_, p. 71.

The Italian influence, therefore, did but hasten a process already at
work. The reasons for this universal movement are very difficult to
determine. But among many suggestions of more or less value, a few
causes of the change may here be hazarded. In the first place, then, the
Renaissance happened to be contemporaneous with the death of feudalism.
The ideal of chivalry is dying out all over Europe; and the romances of
chivalry are everywhere despised. The horizontal class divisions become
obscured by the newly found perpendicular divisions of nationality; and
in Italy and England at least the old feudal nobility have almost
entirely disappeared. A new centre of national life and culture is
therefore in the process of formation, that of the Court; and thanks to
this, the ideal of chivalry gives place to the new ideal of the courtier
or the gentleman. This ideal found literary expression in the moral
Court treatises, which were so universally popular during the
Renaissance, and of which Guevara, Castiglione, and Lyly are the most
famous instances. The ambition of those who frequent Courts has always
been to appear distinguished--distinguished that is from the vulgar and
the ordinary, or, as we should now say, from the Philistine. In the
Courts of the Renaissance period, where learning was considered so
admirable, this necessary distinction would naturally take the form of a
cultured, if not pedantic, diction; and for this it was na