The World's Greatest Books [Volumes 1-15, 17-20]

Erasmus diffuses a lustre over his age, which no other name among the learned supplies. About 1517, he published an enlarged edition of his "Adages," which displays a surprising intimacy with Greek and Roman literature. The most remarkable of them, in every sense, are those which reflect with excessive bitterness on kings and priests. Erasmus knew that the regular clergy were not to be conciliated, and resolved to throw away the scabbard; and his invectives against kings proceeded from a just sense of the oppression of Europe in that age by ambitious and selfish rulers.

We are now brought by necessary steps to the great religious revolution known as the Reformation, with which we are only concerned in so far as it modified the history of literature. In all his dispute, Luther was sustained by a prodigious force of popular opinion; and the German nation was so fully awakened to the abuses of the Church that, if neither Luther nor Zwingli had ever been born, a great religious schism was still at hand. Erasmus, who had so manifestly prepared the way for the new reformers, continued, beyond the year 1520, favourable to their cause. But some of Luther's tenets he did not and could not approve; and he was already disgusted by that intemperance of language which soon led him to secede entirely from the Protestant side.

The laws of synchronism bring strange partners together, and we may pass at once from Luther to Ariosto, whose "Orlando Furioso" was printed at Ferrara in 1516. Ariosto has been, after Homer, the favourite poet of Europe. His grace and facility, his clear and rapid stream of language, his variety of invention, left him no rival.

No edition of "Amadis de Gaul" has been proved to exist before that printed at Seville in 1519. This famous romance was translated into French between 1540 and 1557, and into English by Munday in 1619.

A curious dramatic performance was represented in Paris in 1511, and published in 1516. It is entitled "Le Prince des Sots et la Mère sotte," by Peter Gringore; its chief aim was to ridicule the Pope and the court of Rome. Hans Sachs, a shoemaker of Nuremberg, produced his first carnival play in 1517. The English poets Hawes and Skelton fall within this period.

From 1520 to 1550, Italy, where the literature of antiquity had been first cultivated, still retained her superiority in the fine perception of its beauties, but the study was proceeding also elsewhere in Europe. Few books of that age give us more insight into its literary history and the public taste than the "Circeronianus" of Erasmus, against which Scaliger wrote with unmannerly invective. The same period of thirty years is rich with poets, among whom are the Spanish Mendoza, the Portuguese Ribero, Marot in France, many hymn-writers in Germany; and in England, Wyatt and Surrey. At this time also, Spain was forming its national theatre, chiefly under the influence of Lope de Rueda and of Torres Naharro, the inventor of Spanish comedy. The most celebrated writer of fiction in this age is Rabelais, than whom few have greater fertility of language and imagination.

IV.—The Sixteenth Century (1550–1600)

Montaigne's "Essays," which first appeared at Bordeaux in 1580, make an epoch in literature, being the first appeal from the academy to the haunts of busy and idle men; and this delightful writer had a vast influence on English and French literature in the succeeding age.

Turning now to the Italian poets of our period, we find that most of them are feeble copyists of Petrarch, whose style Bembo had rendered so popular. Casa, Costanzo, Baldi, Celio Magno, Bernardino Rota, Gaspara Stampa, Bernado Tasso, father of the great Tasso, Peter Aretin, and Firenzuola, flourished at this time. The "Jerusalem" of Torquato Tasso is the great epic of modern times; it is read with pleasure in almost every canto, though the native melancholy of Tasso tinges all his poem. It was no sooner published than it was weighed against the "Orlando Furioso," and Europe has not yet agreed which scale inclines.

Spanish poetry is adorned by Luis Ponce de Leon, born in 1527, a religious and mystical lyric poet. The odes of Herrera have a lyric elevation and richness of phrase, derived from the study of Pindar and of the Old Testament. Castillejo, playful and witty, attempted to revive the popular poetry, and ridiculed the imitators of Petrarch.

The great Camoens had now arisen in Portugal; his "Lusiad," written in praise of the Lusitanian people, is the mirror of his loving, courageous, generous, and patriotic heart. Camoens is the chief Portuguese poet in this age, and possibly in every other.

This was an age of verse in France. Pierre Ronsard, Amadis Jamyn his pupil, Du Bartas, Pibrac, Desportes, and many others, were gradually establishing the rules of metre, and the Alexandrine was displacing the old verse of ten syllables.

Of German poetry there is little to say; but England had Lord Vaux's short pieces in "The Paradise of Dainty Devices"; Sackville, with his "Induction" to the "Mirrour of Magistrates," 1559; George Gascoyne, whose "Steel Glass," 1576, is the earliest English satire; and, above all, Spenser, whose "Shepherd's Kalendar" appeared in 1579. This work was far more natural and more pleasing than the other pastorals of the age. Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis," and his "Rape of Lucrece," were published in 1593–94. Sir Philip Sidney, Raleigh, Lodge, Breton, Marlowe, Green, Watson, Davison, Daniel, and Michael Drayton were now writing poems, and Drake has a list of more than two hundred English poets of this time.