limitations imposed on Art by ecclesiastical conventions were deprived of
their old rigour, and it was no longer sought to confine the painter to
producing altar pieces and glorified or magnified missal-margins. The
immediate tangible and visible results were however hardly to be found
outside of Italy and the Low Countries; and if English domestic
architecture took on a new face, it was the outcome rather of the social
than the artistic change: since men wanted comfortable houses instead of
fortresses to dwell in. The Renaissance in its creative artistic phase
touched England directly hardly at all.

On its literary side, the movement was not creative but scholarly and
critical, though a great creative movement was its outcome. In the earlier
period the name of Ariosto is an exception; but otherwise the greatest of
the men of Letters are perhaps, in their several ways, Erasmus and
Macchiavelli abroad and Thomas More in England. Scholars and students were
doing an admirable work of which the world was much in need; displacing the
schoolmen, overturning mediaeval authorities and conventions, reviving the
knowledge of the mighty Greek Literature which for centuries had been
buried in oblivion, introducing fresh standards of culture, spreading
education, creating an entirely new intellectual atmosphere. An enormous
impulse was given to the new influences by the very active encouragement
which the princes of Europe, lay and ecclesiastical, extended to them, the
nobility following in the wake of the princes. The best literary brains of
the day however were largely absorbed by the religious movement. The great
imaginative writers, unless we except Rabelais, appear in the latter half
of the sixteenth century--Tasso and Camoens and Cervantes, [Footnote:
_Don Quixote_ did not appear till 1605; but Cervantes was then nearly
sixty.] Spenser and Marlowe and Shakespeare, as well as Montaigne. But even
in the first half of the century, Copernicus enunciated the new theory that
the Sun, not the Earth, is the centre of the astronomical system; and