"SPENSER READING THE 'FAERIE QUEENE' TO SIR WALTER RALEIGH," BY JOHN CLARETON Spenser and Raleigh were two of the most splendid and chivalrous personages of Elizabeth's court. They were courtiers, soldiers, and above all, lovers of literature.

is the characteristic of all really great literature. In telling the story of Don Quixote, Cervantes came to laugh and remained to pray. Don Quixote himself, "nigh fifty years of age, of a hale and strong complexion, lean bodied and thin faced, an early riser, and a lover of hunting," astride his steed Rozinante, so thin that its bones "stuck out like the corners of a Spanish reel," is a figure of fun. His adoration of his Dulcinea is ridiculous. His servant Sancho Panza is a glutton and a liar. Yet long before one has read Don Quixote to the end the knight has become the real hero of a genuine human romance, and Cervantes has discovered, what Dickens discovered when he created Mr. Toots and Captain Cuttle, that to be weak-minded is often to be large-hearted, and that the foolish are often more worthy of admiration than the wise. The knight never fails in chivalry, and his faith is unshakable. One of the most famous incidents in the story occurs when Don Quixote couches his lance and charges a windmill. When he first caught sight of the windmills he was vastly excited.

"Fortune," cried he, "directs our affairs better than we curselves could have wished: look yonder, friend Sancho, there are at least thirty outrageous giants whom I intend to encounter; and, having deprived them of life, we will begin to enrich ourselves with their spoils; for they are lawful prize; and the extirpation of that cursed brood will be an acceptable service to heaven."

When the knight's lance is broken into shivers and he and his horse are hurled away, his faith remains unshaken. "That cursed necromancer Freston," he said, "has transformed these giants into windmills to deprive me of the honour of victory." The faith that can remove mountains must be a faith that can turn hard facts into thrilling romances. And only the man with a great heart ever had the audacity to tilt at windmills.

Sancho Panza, for all his gluttony and selfishness, is a goodnatured and faithful servant, and it may be that when Dickens

==

attached Sam Weller to Mr. Pickwick he had Sancho in mind.
Sancho Panza is shrewd enough to see through his master, but
because he can see through him he can see what is in him, and his
master's great heart commands his servant's affection.

Cervantes gave the world one of its greatest and noblest
figures—sanguine and enthusiastic, ennobled by his very illu-
sions, graced with true dignity, even in the most undignified situa-
tions-always entirely lovable.

§ 5

ERASMUS AND THOMAS MORE

The Renaissance saw the two great movements which more than anything else, more even than the French Revolution, have moulded the course of European history, the Reformation and the counter-Reformation. The Reformation occurred almost immediately after the invention of printing, and it was natural that the bitter controversy between the reformers and the adherents of the old faith should have led to the publication of a vast polemical literature. Books dealing with the religious and theological difficulties of bygone generations do not make exciting reading, and cannot be regarded as of any great literary importance. One, however, of the sixteenth century theologians was a great scholar and a great writer. He was the Dutchman, Erasmus, the friend of Sir Thomas More, the author of Utopia, of Cardinal Wolsey, and of Dean Colet, whose enthusiasm for education and the new learning made him the founder of St. Paul's School, London. At the beginning of the Renaissance there was, perhaps, a greater enthusiasm for learning than there has been at any other time in European history, and of all the learned men in Renaissance Europe, Erasmus was notoriously the most learned. Popes, emperors, and kings conspired to do him honour.

A Voluminous Author

Erasmus was one of the last great European writers who wrote in Latin. He was a voluminous author, and perhaps to modern readers his most interesting book is The Praise of Folly, which was reprinted more than seven times in the course of a few months. In The Praise of Folly Erasmus satirises "the student for his sickly look, the grammarian for his self-satisfaction, the philosopher for his quibbling, the sportsman for his love of butchery, the superstitious for his belief in the virtue of images and shrines."

Sir Thomas More, with whose writings the Renaissance may be said to have begun in England, was born nearly a hundred years earlier than Shakespeare, and was the contemporary of Ariosto, Machiavelli, and Rabelais. More was a great lawyer (a Lord Chancellor in the reign of Henry VIII), a scholar, and a man of wide culture and appreciation. He was the intimate friend of Dean Colet, of Erasmus, and of the Dutch painter Holbein, who lived for a while in his house at Chelsea. He was a wit and a man of conscience and character, who lost great place and finally his life rather than agree to the Act of Supremacy, which made Henry VIII the supreme head of the English Church, declaring that "there are things which no Parliament can do no Parliament can make a law that God shall not be God." It is an interesting fact that this great Renaissance scholar should have been beatified by Pope Leo XIII in 1886 and should now live in Church history as the Blessed Thomas More.

Thomas More was fascinated by the new learning in his early youth, and he was one of the first Englishmen to learn to read Greek. His famous book Utopia, which inspired Bacon's The New Atlantis and many another dream of the future, and which has given an expressive adjective to the English language, was obviously based on Plato's Republic. It is impossible to understand the spirit of the Renaissance unless one remembers

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