CHARLES F. HORNE

The Renaissance marks the separation of the mediaeval from the modern
world. The wide difference between the two epochs of Teutonic history
arises, we are apt somewhat glibly to say, from the fact that our
ancestors worshipped and were ruled by brute force, whereas we follow the
broad light of intellect. Perhaps both statements require modification;
yet in a general way they do suggest the change which by a thousand
different agencies has, in the course of the last four centuries, been
forced upon the world. Mediaeval Europe was a land not of equals, but of
lords and slaves. The powerful nobles regarded themselves as of wholly
different clay from the hapless peasants whom they trampled under foot,
serfs so ignorant, so brutalized by want, that they were often little
better than the beasts with which they herded. Gradually the tradesmen,
the middle classes, forced their way to practical equality with the
nobles. Then came the turn of the masses to do the same. The beginnings
of the merchants' movement we have already traced in the preceding
volumes; the end of the peasants' effort is perhaps even to-day scarce
yet accomplished.

In dealing with modern history, therefore, every writer is apt to begin
with a different date. Some go back as far as Petrarch, who reintroduced
the study of ancient art and learning; that is, they regard our world as
a direct continuation of the Roman, with the thousand years of the Middle
Ages gaping between like an earthquake gulf of barbarism, that was
bridged at last. Some take the invention of printing as a starting-point,
feeling that the chief element of our progress has been the gathering of
information by the poorer classes. Some, looking to political changes,
turn to the reign of Louis XI of France, noting him as the first modern