XII. MEDICINE…

XII. MEDICINE

It is not surprising that there should have been a magnificent century of achievement in medicine at this time because their standards of medical education were at a high level and were well maintained. The medieval requirements for medical education had been three years of preliminary work at the university, four years in the medical schools, special courses in surgery if practice was to be in that department, and a year's experience with a physician before personal practice on one's own responsibility was allowed. The laws of the Emperor Frederick for the Two Sicilies in the thirteenth century were very strict in this matter and they constituted the standard which came to be very generally adopted. In the Italian universities the Papal charters explicitly demanded these requirements. [Footnote 34]

[Footnote 34: For full details of this surprising, too little known formal development of medicine, see Walsh, "The Popes and Science," Fordham University Press, N. Y., 1907, where all the documents will be found.]

We have a series of re-enactments on this subject just about the middle of the fifteenth century. Above all, clinical experience was required before the license to practise would be issued. In 1449 the medical Faculty of Paris required that graduates in medicine should diligently visit the hospitals or accompany a skilful practitioner in his visits to patients and refused to grant the license when this rule was not observed. In Ingolstadt graduates in medicine, according to the statutes of 1472, were obliged to take an oath that they would practise only as the representatives of their teacher, or of some other doctor of the faculty of that place, until they were considered skilful enough to receive the license for practice on their own responsibility.

In the hospitals of this time, which were large and well arranged, thoroughly ventilated and capable of being well cleansed, {382} there was ample opportunity for clinical teaching and we know that it was taken. A manuscript of Galen of the fifteenth century which is preserved at Dresden has a number of initial miniatures, in which groups engaged in clinical instruction are noteworthy. In his "History of Medical Education," [Footnote 35] Puschmann notes the details of some of these. There is a picture of a patient suffering from some wasting disease, near whose bed stand a doctor and two nurses, while the doctor dictates a prescription to his pupils. There is a demonstration of leg ulcers by a physician to a pupil and a surgical operation on the leg performed by the pupil in the presence of his teacher, as well as the opening of an abscess in the axilla. There were hospitals in every town of 5,000 and this gave ample opportunities for clinical experience. When hospitals are numerous and well managed there must be physicians to attend on them and this provides opportunities for thorough study of patients.

[Footnote 35: Translation by Hare, London, 1891.]

The influences that were at work to lift medical education to a higher plane in practical efficiency may be judged from such expressions as those of Rabelais, who, in his letter on education in "Gargantua," suggests as preparatory studies for medicine, Greek and Latin with even a little Hebrew, for the sake of the Holy Scriptures, and natural science, especially zoology, botany and mineralogy, and "then carefully go over again the books of the Greek, Arabian and Latin physicians, not despising the Talmudists and Cabalists; and by frequent dissections acquire perfect knowledge of the outer world, the microcosm, which is man." He himself has shown in a number of passages that he had taken his own advice and even in his famous description of the anatomy of Lent in which his comparisons were formerly thought more or less fanciful, "they are extraordinarily apt and vivid and show deep knowledge of anatomy," while his descriptions of wounds show a competent familiarity with surgical anatomy. This might very well be expected, for Rabelais invented two surgical instruments, one for the reduction of fractures of the thigh bone and the other for operating in cases of strangulated hernia. He has at least one passage in which it is clear that he knew much more about the circulation of the blood than is usually supposed to have {383} been known in his time and which demonstrates that there had been a gradual accumulation of knowledge on this subject before Harvey's time. (See chapter on Biological Sciences.)

The interest in medicine can be best realized from the large number of medical books that were printed almost immediately after the discovery of printing. After theology medicine was the subject most occupying the attention of printers. During Columbus' Century a whole series of the classics of medicine was reprinted and made available for wide reading. The patience and scholarship required for this can only be properly appreciated by those who know the labor of reading the crabbed handwriting of the old manuscripts and collating them and the time required to elucidate erroneous readings that had crept in through the negligence of copyists. The world owes an immense debt to the Renaissance for this work. To a great extent these books have been neglected for the last two centuries and we are only now coming to realize how much the scholarly interest of that time meant for subsequent generations. Many of these books are now being republished to the great benefit of medicine. Not only were Hippocrates and Galen and Celsus and the other classics republished, but also the writers of the intermediate time, Aetius, Alexander of Tralles, the great Arabian writers and then the important contributors to medicine and surgery in the later Middle Ages. The value of the debt thus owed is growing in estimation every year.

The publication of medical books, even during the score of years immediately after printing began to be employed, shows the intense interest in the subject. The first medical publication was a purgation calendar, that is, a list of the days of the year on which purgations should be practised. This was printed by Gutenberg, 1457. Heinrich von Pfolspeundt's "Treatise on Surgery" was printed in 1460; in 1470 medical treatises by Valescus de Tarenta, Jacopo de Dondis and Matthaeus Sylvaticus were printed. In 1471 treatises by Mesne and Nicolaus Salernitanus were put in type. In 1472 the old "Regimen Sanitatis" was printed and Bellegardo's monograph on "Pediatrics." In 1473 Simon of Genoa's "Medical Dictionary" was set up and in 1476 William of Salicet's "Cyrurgia" was given {384} to the press. In 1478 the first edition of Celsus was printed, and the first printed edition of Mondino's "Anathomia" was ready for sale. In 1479 came the first edition of "Avicenna." In spite of the great losses of books that have taken place in the course of time because of fire, water, use and other enemies, we still possess many medical books printed practically in every year of the first quarter of a century after the discovery of printing. Unfortunately the neglect of these old classics during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did more than all the other inimical elements put together in reducing the number of medical incunabula that we might have had.

The first great medical teacher of Columbus' period was Nicholas Leonicenus, born in 1428, who studied medicine at Padua, lived for some ninety-six years and was professor of medicine at Ferrara for over sixty years. He translated the "Aphorisms" of Hippocrates and some of Galen's works into Latin, and occupied himself with the application of the principles laid down in these great classics in his practice, and above all, in his teaching. He made it the business of his life to oppose the Arabian over-medication and especially the use of many drugs on general principles, and he insisted on natural modes of cure, diet, water, exercise, fresh air and the correction of any morbid habits that might have been formed. Probably more than anyone else he influenced the medicine of the first half of Columbus' Century and his work has come to be well recognized in recent years with the growth of interest in the history of medicine.

After him, one of the most important of the physicians of the time was Thomas Linacre, who, after studying some ten years in Italy, returned to England to become the attending physician to Henry VIII. His translations of Galen's works attracted wide attention and Erasmus, Linacre's friend, once declared that after Linacre's translation Galen now spoke much better Latin than he had Greek before. Linacre was a type of the learned physicians of the time and was one of the greatest scholars of the period. That scholarship did not make men impractical, Linacre's organization of the College of Physicians of England is abundant evidence. He found the practice of medicine on his return to England sadly degenerate, {385} because there was no competent authority to maintain proper standards of medical education and prosecute those who attempted to practise medicine without any proper training and sometimes, indeed, without any knowledge of the subject. Through the charter from the King, at first for London and subsequently for England, the duty of caring for the protection of the public against the illegal practice of medicine was committed to the Royal College of Physicians. Linacre organized and endowed it, and it continues to exist and exert an excellent influence over medical practice in England under its original charter down to the present time.

Another of the distinguished contributors to medical practice at this time was John Caius, who also translated some of Galen's works and especially the "De Medendi Methodo," his edition containing a series of annotations from his teacher Montanus, and from his own observations on patients. He is deservedly best known for his little book on the Sweating Sickness, in which he exhibited his power of observation and his ability to describe what he saw. Gesner, the great European biologist of the time, who was on terms of intimate relation by correspondence with Caius and knew his work on plants and animals very well, styled him, in the preface to his "Icones Animalium," "a man of consummate erudition, fidelity and diligence as well as judgment," and in an epistle to Queen Elizabeth bestows upon him the eulogium of "the most learned physician of his age." Caius has the merit of introducing the regular practice of dissection into the English teaching of medicine. As Linacre had done, Caius too, as he grew older, used the money which he had accumulated as Royal physician and in the lucrative practice of medicine in London for academic foundations. Linacre founded chairs in Greek and medicine at Oxford and Cambridge, as well as the College of Physicians, and Caius, after having been the first president of Linacre's Royal College, founded Caius College at Cambridge, where he died in 1572. His last year of life had been disturbed by the looting of his rooms of a number of pious articles connected with the old Church to which he faithfully adhered, and Mr. Andrew Lang suggests that only Dr. Caius' timely, though untimely, death (he was but 63 years of age) prevented {386} him from sharing the fate of the pious articles associated with the old faith which he had cherished as faithfully as the tenets of that faith itself.

One of the important teachers of medicine at this time was Giovanni de Monte, according to the custom of the time known by the Latinized name of Montanus. He was distinguished for his application of the humanities to medicine and his direct translations of Greek medical books into Latin, so as to avoid the errors which had come from the roundabout translation in the previous times of Greek into Arabian and then into Latin. To him, almost more than any other, is due the reputation that the medical school of Padua obtained at this time, for he gave a series of clinical lectures on the patients in the Hospital of St. Francis which were written down. They show how thorough were his observations and how suggestive his teaching. No wonder that he had pupils from all over Europe. His pupils thought of him as the Americans did of Louis during the early part of the nineteenth century. Many Germans went to hear him. It was a Polish student who reported some of his lectures and Dr. John Caius was, as we have said, one of his most ardent students. Montanus insisted on making careful inspections of the dead bodies in order to control his diagnosis, and the teaching at Padua under him was thoroughly practical and such as we are likely to think of as modern.

Quite different from the line of learned physicians who drew their inspiration from the Greek classics of medicine, was another of the great physicians of Columbus' period who ran counter to all the old medical traditions and dared to think for himself. This was Paracelsus, whose motto "qui suus esse potest, non sit alterius"--he who can form an opinion of his own should not borrow that of others--shows the independent character of the man. He broke away from the teachings of medicine in Latin and sought far and wide for anything and everything that might help in the cure of disease. He has been an extremely hard man for historians to estimate and appreciations of him have differed very greatly. There is no doubt at all that he did much to introduce chemical remedies of many kinds into medicine, though he was a decided opponent of the polypharmacy of his day, a heritage from the Arabian {387} physicians, who delighted in giving a large number of drugs. There are expressions of his which show how carefully he had thought out the problems of the practice of medicine. He said: "to be a true alchemist is to understand the chemistry of life." "Medicine is not merely a science but an art. It does not consist in compounding pills and plasters and drugs of all kinds, but it deals with the processes of life, which must be understood before they can be guided."

Above all Paracelsus recognized that success in medicine depends on the treatment of the patient rather than his disease, and he insisted on the idea that nature was, as a rule, eminently curative of diseases rather than prone to make the affection worse, as physicians at so many times in the history of medicine seem to have thought. Paracelsus declared that "the knowledge of nature is the foundation of the science of medicine and a physician should be the servant of nature, not her enemy; he should be able to guide and direct her in her struggle for life and not by his unreasonable drugging throw fresh obstacles in the way of recovery." He appreciated very clearly the influence of the mind on the body and said "the powerful will may cure where a doubt will end in failure. The character of the physician may act more powerfully upon the patient than all the drugs employed." He realized also the place of the conditions surrounding the patient as helpful towards his cure. He said: "the physical surroundings of the patient may have a great influence upon the cure of his disease. Diet is an extremely important element of cure and the physician should know how to regulate the diet of the patient." He called attention to the fact that trained attendants sympathetic with the patient are far better for him than relatives who may be over-solicitous and show it, or neglectful because they wish the death of the patient.

Paracelsus was the first to write on occupation diseases and his monograph on "Bergsucht," "miner's disease," is a monument to his power of observation. His clinical acuity is further exemplified by his recognition of the relation between cretinism and endemic goitre. He also wrote a booklet on mineral baths and analyzed mineral waters for bathing and drinking purposes, getting at the iron content of chalybeate {388} waters by testing with gallic acid, and the resultant ink reaction, and also demonstrating the presence of other salts. He did more than anyone else to establish properly in medicine the use of opium (as laudanum), mercury, lead, arsenic, and his chemical experiments taught him much about copper sulphate and potassium sulphate and he recognized zinc as an elementary substance.

He did quite as much for medicine by his negative conclusions and his opposition to medical practices that had been common up to his time as by his positive observations. Indeed it might possibly be thought that there was more to his credit from the negative side. He set himself up in strenuous opposition to the silly uroscopy and uromancy by which physicians had deceived others and very often deceived themselves. Something of the value of the urine in medical diagnosis had been recognized in the Middle Ages, and then, as practically always happens in medicine, little-minded men had pretended to be able to learn much more from it than could possibly be revealed by it. Every disease came to have its specific urine and diagnosis and prognosis came to be largely dependent on changes in the color and character of the urine that were in themselves quite insignificant. Paracelsus brushed all this ridiculous nonsense aside, but of course, in doing so, made a great many enemies. Men are much more disturbed, as a rule, by having their false knowledge corrected than their real knowledge amended.

Paracelsus also refused to accept the practically universal persuasion that every disease was an indication for blood-letting. He was sure that in a great many cases this practice did more harm than good. He felt the same way with regard to the almost universal purgation that was being practised for every form of ill. No one recognized better than he that there were poisonous substances in the body which produced serious affections. He was quite willing to be persuaded, too, that these poisonous substances could be at least to some extent removed from the body by purgatives. He feared, however, lest purgation might carry off with it many materials more beneficial to the body than the poisons it would drain were harmful. The idea of an autotoxemia or an autointoxication {389} is constantly recurring in medicine, and the supposed remedies for its cure prove subsequently nearly always to have done more harm than good. Medicine owes much to Paracelsus for his firm stand in this matter. Shakespeare's genius in intuition was right when in "All's Well That Ends Well" he ranged the modern German with one of the greatest of the ancients. "So say I, both of Galen and Paracelsus."

Meyer in his "History of Chemistry" has summed up what Paracelsus accomplished by the co-ordination of chemistry and medicine. As it is not the purpose of the great German historian of chemistry to give a panegyric of Paracelsus but simply to indicate his place in the history of chemical evolution, that opinion must have great weight. He said, page 71: [Footnote 36]

[Footnote 36: "A History of Chemistry, from Earliest Times to the Present Day: Being also an Introduction to the Study of the Science," by Ernst von Meyer, Professor of Chemistry in the Technical High School, Dresden; translated, with the author's sanction, by George McGowan, Ph.D.; third edition; London: Macmillan and Co., 1906.]

"Paracelsus was the man who, in the first half of the sixteenth century, opened out new paths for chemistry and medicine by joining them together. To him is undoubtedly due the merit of freeing chemistry from the restrictive fetters of alchemy, by a clear definition of scientific aims. He taught that 'the object of chemistry is not to make gold but to prepare medicines.' True chemical remedies had been used now and again before his time, but Paracelsus differed from his predecessors in the theoretical motives which led him to employ them. He regarded the healthy human body as a combination of certain chemical matters; when these underwent change in any way, illness resulted, and the latter could therefore only be cured by means of chemical medicines. The foregoing sentence contains the quintessence of Paracelsus' doctrine; the principles of the old school of Galen were quite incompatible with it, these having nothing to do with chemistry."

His contributions to surgery are almost more important than those to medicine, for he insisted on keeping wounds clean and deprecated the meddlesome surgery of the time. Cutting loose from everything that had been taught before his time, he {390} almost necessarily made many mistakes. Besides, in spite of his insistence on scientific demonstration, he accepted many things for which there was no good reason. His works, most of which we owe not directly to himself but to his students, contain many absurdities. There is no doubt at all, however, that he was a great genius and that the medicine of this century and of succeeding generations owes much to him. He well deserves the name of the Father of Pharmaceutical Chemistry which has sometimes been given to him. He represents one of the important links in the tradition of medicine and is a man who is ever more appreciated the more we have learned about him through recent studies of his writings." [Footnote 37]

[Footnote 37: Even Paracelsus' mistakes have had something of genius in them. Above all, his influence has lived on through the generations. His doctrine of signatures and his study of the effects of poisons on the human system had more to do than anything else with the establishment of the therapeutic systems of Hahnemann and Rademacher.]

We have some two score of books attributed to him, but probably less than a score are really his. Probably no one has ever had a higher view of medicine. He bases it on the relationship which man bears to nature as a whole and anticipates the very modern idea that disease is not a negation, but itself a phase of life. Magnetism represents a great force for him and some form of it is supposed to emanate from all bodies and place them in relation with each other. The influence of the stars on human constitutions is only one phase of this magnetism which binds all the world together. The superabundance of vitality in certain men gave them a magnetic influence over other men and this magnetic influence might even persist after death. Hence mummies were supposed to contain a certain astral balsam and the consumption of mummy substance gave wonderful vitality to ailing persons. Like scientists at all times, Paracelsus had to have his explanation for miracles. He suggested that saints were people with an abundance of vitality and some of this remained in their bodies after their deaths just in the same way as it remained in the bodies of mummies. It was sufficient, then, to come within the sphere of the influence of these bodies to be affected by it. Miracles, then, were not exceptions to the laws of nature but merely {391} fulfilment of laws that men were only just getting to understand. That has been the favorite mode of explanation for miracles ever since, though a new set of facts has always been adduced as the basis of the explanation.

Of course Paracelsus believed in many absurdities. He suggests, for instance, that it is possible to transplant toothache into a tree after the following fashion. Having taken away a portion of the bark, a piece of the wood is cut and with it the gum is pricked until the blood flows. Then the piece of wood stained with blood is set again in its place in the tree and the bark is also replaced. He believed also in the vulnerary ointment, which could cure wounds, not by application to the wound itself but to the weapon. It was important, however, that the weapon should be stained with the blood from the wound. He had the feeling that the morbid elements of an affection or a wound were contained in the blood and might be neutralized even outside the body. The vulnerary ointment was composed of moss from the head of a dead person, preferably one who had been put to death for murder, mummy, human fat and human blood. It all seems so absurd to us now, but behind such prescriptions was the theory that some of the vital force of these human beings could be made over to the diseased person in order to add to his vitality. Many absurd prescriptions have been made on theories not nearly so reasonable as this of Paracelsus.

To this period also belongs the name of Basil Valentine, who has been called the last of the alchemists and the first of the chemists. Just now we are passing through a phase of historical criticism which throws doubt on his real existence, though we have a series of books under his name published at the end of the sixteenth century. Tradition declares that he was a Benedictine monk living about the middle of the fifteenth century, who tested many forms of drugs with the idea of securing materials for the cure of human diseases. To him is attributed the discovery of hydrochloric acid, which he called the spirit of salt, sugar of lead, and a method of preparing sulphuric acid and probably ammonia. He is best known for his work on antimony and his book, "The Triumphant Chariot of Antimony," put that metal and its salts into medical practice {392} for centuries. The indication for it was that disease was largely due to a toxaemia or accumulation of poisons in the system, the modern idea of auto-toxaemia, and that these could be best removed by brisk purgation. The use of calomel subsequently, the theory underlying venesection and a great many of our modern surgical fads for the improvement of man's condition by taking something out of him have the same notion for basis.

Basil Valentine's works are precious because they insist that physicians must know the drugs they use and their effects, not merely by reading about them, but by studying them on patients and on animals. He himself is said to have tried the effect of antimony on the swine belonging to the monastery in which he did his work, and other materials are said to have been tested in the same way. He is thus really a father of experimental medicine. He cannot say too much in deprecation of physicians who give medicines which they know little about for diseases about which they know less. In my sketch of him in "Catholic Churchmen in Science" (Dolphin Press, Philadelphia, 1907) I quote a passage from his "Triumphant Chariot of Antimony," in which he bitterly condemns the practice of physicians who give remedies knowing practically nothing about them, only that they have been recommended by someone else. It read like a diatribe of the modern time against allowing the manufacturing chemist to suggest drugs for medical practice. The passage makes very clear what is the secret of the mystery by which remedies come and go in medicine because of insufficient testing. Valentine said:

"And whensoever I shall have occasion to contend in the school with such a Doctor, who knows not how himself to prepare his own medicines, but commits that business to another, I am sure I shall obtain the palm from him; for indeed, that good man knows not what medicines he prescribes to the sick; whether the color of them be white, black, grey or blew, he cannot tell; nor doth this wretched man know whether the medicine he gives be dry or hot, cold or humid; but he only knows that he found it so written in his Books, and thence pretends knowledge (or as it were, Possession) by Prescription of a very long time; yet he desires to further information. {393} Here again let it be lawful to exclaim, Good God, to what a state is the matter brought! what goodness of minde is in these men! what care do they take of the sick! Wo, wo to them! in the day of judgment they will find the fruit of their ignorance and rashness, then they will see Him Whom they pierced, when they neglected their Neighbor, sought after money and nothing else; whereas, were they cordial in their profession, they would spend Nights and Days in Labour that they might become more learned in their Art, whence more certain health would accrew to the sick with their Estimation and greater Glory to themselves. But since Labour is tedious to them, they commit the matter to Chance, and being secure of their Honour and content with their Fame, they (like Brawlers) defend themselves with a certain Garrulity, without any respect to Confidence or Truth."

Another of the great physicians of the time was Cornelius Agrippa, born in 1486, of the old family of Nettesheim. Cornelius was at first the secretary of the Emperor Maximilian, then a warrior and finally a student of both law and medicine, yet all was accomplished so expeditiously that when he was but twenty-four the Parliament of Dole came in a body to hear his lectures on the Cabalistic Books of Reuchlin. He practised for a while as a physician at Geneva after having been an advocate at Metz and, with the tendency to wander that so many of the men of this time had, we find him afterwards at Freiburg, at Lyons, then for a time the physician of Louise of Savoy, but jealousy drove him from the Court and a little later we find him starving in Antwerp, and then in prison at Brussels. He passed through Cologne, was at Bonn for a time and is heard from in prison at Lyons. He seems to have run the whole gamut of human suffering. It is hard to know what he was imprisoned for, but he seems to have been a man who easily made enemies, refused to think that anyone else knew much and probably his necessities led him into the doing of things that were suspicious at least, if not actually criminal.

Agrippa was very much interested in magnetism, quite taken with the idea of human magnetism and above all very much persuaded of the influence of the mind on the body. He felt {394} the place that autosuggestion or strong persuasion has in enabling men to accomplish anything and he said: "We must therefore in every work and application of things affect vehemently, imagine, hope and believe strongly, for that will be a great help." He was quite sure that the mind could influence the body strongly for healing purposes and would doubtless have been looked upon as an advocate of New Thought or Psychic Healing or some of the other schools of mental therapeutics in our time, though he believed also in the use of medicines and remedial measures. Another phase of his anticipation of some modern ideas may be still more interesting for our generation, though it only shows how prone human thought is to run in cycles and how hard it is to find anything new under the sun: it may be rather surprising to many to learn that Agrippa seems to have had a definite persuasion that woman was superior to man. He was what the French would have called "a feminist of the most modern." A book of his on the subject recently appeared as a bibliographic treasure in the London bookseller, Tregaskis' catalogue (No. 736). The title was: "Female Pre-Eminence: or The Dignity and Excellence of that Sex Above the Male." An Ingenious Discourse: Written originally in Latine, by Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Knight, Doctor of Physick, Doctor of Both Laws, and Privy-Counsellor to the Emperour Charles V. Done into English with additional advantages. By H. (Enry) C. (are) Printed by T. R. and M. D. and are to be sold by Henry Milion, 1670. The catalogue contains the note: "Strong arguments in favor of women's superiority. It is rendered into English, well embroidered with poetic imagery and rich in furiously entertaining passages."

The most important scientific development for medicine came from pathological anatomy. This science is supposed as a rule to be of much later origin than the period we are occupied with, but the interest in the history of medicine in recent years has shown us how much of attention there was given to pathology and how many observations were accumulating in the published books of the Renaissance time. There was much more of such scientific observation in the Middle Ages than is usually thought. Three men at the beginning of {395} Columbus' Century, Professor Montagnana of Padua, Professor Savonarola of Ferrara, the grandfather of the martyred Dominican, and Professor Arcolani of Bologna, described a number of different lesions which they had noted in the many bodies that were being dissected at this time. In the next few years these observations multiply. Benedetti, the Professor of Anatomy at Padua and the founder of the anatomical theatre at that university, made reports on gall-stones and apoplexies. Benivieni, a simple practising physician at Florence, was probably the first to describe gall-stones and he has a very large number of pathological observations. He is the first that we know who made a number of autopsies with the definite idea of finding out the cause of death and he has come deservedly to be called, as a consequence, the Father of Pathological Anatomy. Allbutt, the Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Cambridge, says of him: "Before Vesalius, before Eustachius, he opened the bodies of the dead as deliberately and clear-sightedly as any pathologist in the spacious times of Baillie, Bright and Addison," and Malgaigne has described his book as "the only work on pathology which owes nothing to anyone."

It became the custom then to collect observations of this kind and Berengar of Carpi, the discoverer of the appendix, who had dissected a great many bodies, described a number of pathological changes. Aranzi, the professor of medicine and of anatomy in Bologna, has many observations of pathological finds in his book and paid special attention to tumors. Ingrassias, professor of anatomy at Naples, was also interested in pathology and, as specializing had become the fashion, his observations were mainly with regard to bones. Eustachius, the professor of anatomy in Rome, declares in the preface to his anatomical tables that he was the first to make autopsies for pathological purposes in Rome, and that he had collected an abundant amount of material. The publication of Eustachius' anatomy was delayed until long after his death and his pathological observations were never published. Columbus in Rome made a series of autopsies even on high ecclesiastics for the purpose of determining the cause of death and evidently the science of pathology was gradually coming into existence. Vesalius made a large number of pathological observations {396} and promised in his book on normal anatomy to publish them. Unfortunately he never did so, and his notes seem lost, though it is not impossible that the manuscript or some portion of it may yet be found in Spain.

In many other countries besides Italy, however, pathological anatomy attracted much attention. Joost van Lom, often known by his Latin name of Jodocus Lommius, a physician in Brussels, who was royal physician to King Philip II, published three books of medical observations at Antwerp just after the close of Columbus' Century (1560) in which notes of all diseases and problems of prognosis are set forth. Johann Kentmann, a physician of Torgau, devoted a great deal of attention to the study of the formation of all kinds of calculi in human beings, biliary, salivary and intestinal. Francisco Valles, Professor of Medicine at the University of Alcala in Spain, published a volume of Galen's "De Locis Affectis," in which he incorporated many notes of his own pathological observations. Jacques Houillier (Hollerius) published about the same time at Paris, where he was professor of medicine, a book on "Internal Diseases" with many pathological notes. Johann Weyer (Wierus) also added valuable pathological annotations to his writings.

At the end of the century pathological anatomy as a definite department of medicine had been firmly established. Dodoens (Dodonaeus), Royal physician to the Emperor Maximilian II and Rudolph II, made a large number of valuable observations at autopsies and described cases of pneumonia, ulcers of the stomach, inflammation of the abdominal organs, aneurisms of the coronary arteries and of the arteries of the stomach, stony concretions in the lungs, purulent conditions of the ureters and kidney, and ergotism. Even more important for the science was the work of Schenck von Graffenberg, official physician at Freiburg in Breisgau, who gathered together a larger collection of observations on the diseases of separate organs than had ever been made since Hippocrates' time. He paid special attention to the pathological anatomy of these cases and while many of the observations were his own, a great many of them had been collected from friends. His work was done after the close of Columbus' Century, but he {397} himself was over twenty before the century closed and he was only carrying out the inspiration that had been given by workers in that tune. Pieter van Foreest (Petrus Forestus), a practising physician in Delft, deserves almost as much credit as Schenck von Graffenberg and much more than many of the professors in medicine and anatomy of this tune. He made a special study of the pathological conditions of the ordinary diseases and was indefatigable in collecting information. His own observations include more than 100 cases with autopsies. With this spirit abroad the future of scientific medicine was assured.

A good idea of the accomplishment of the medical teachers of the time may be judged very well from the life of Fracastorius. Prof. Osler in his sketch of him published in his book, "An Alabama Student," [Footnote 38] says: "The scientific reputation of Fracastorius rests upon the work 'De Contagione.' It contains among other things three contributions of the first importance--a clear statement of the problems of contagion and infection, a recognition of typhus fever and a remarkable pronouncement on the contagiousness of phthisis." In the same sketch Osler adds: "Fracastorius draws a remarkable parallel between the processes of contagion and the fermentation of wine. It is not the same as putrefaction, which differs in the absence of any new generation and is accompanied with an abominable smell. Certain poisons resemble contagion in their action, but they differ essentially in not producing in the individual the principle or germ capable of acting on another poison." This discussion is wonderfully complete and thorough, yet conservative. Later Boyle declared that a time would come when someone would discover the cause of fermentation and probably at the same time throw light on the origin of contagious disease. That prophecy was fulfilled when Pasteur made his studies in the fermentation of wine and beer and then went on to lay the foundation of bacteriology. Fracastorius' thoroughly scientific spirit will be appreciated from the fact that, like Leonardo, he saw fossils in their true light and has the first reference in the history of science to the magnetic poles of the earth.

[Footnote 38: Oxford Press, 1908.]

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Men whose names are usually associated with surgery often manifested successful interest, and above all, power of observation in pure medicine. A single example may be taken in illustration. Anyone who thinks that observation and theory and investigation of arthritism is new or that we have occupied ourselves much more with the study of its symptoms than they did in the olden time should read Pare's chapters on Gout. He says that the word gout, which appealed to him as French, was probably used because the humors distil drop by drop, goutte a goutte over the joints. Or perhaps because sometimes a single drop (goutte) of the humor of this disease causes very great pain. He describes the deposits of gypsum-like material, or stony matter like chalk, which occur in the affection. The severe pains which occur in connection with the disease Pare does not hesitate to attribute to alteration of the humors by a poison which he calls "virus arthritique" He notes that the pains are distinctly influenced by atmospheric fluctuations, so that one may well say of the gouty that they carry with them an almanac which may serve them as a weather indicator all their lives. Serious complications can arise in gout if the humors of the disease involve other organs than the joints. He attributed inflammations of the liver, of the pleura, colicky disturbances of the intestines, to this cause. Continuous fevers represented for him the effect of the gouty toxin upon the large vessels, while paralyses might occur if the gouty toxin involved the "porosities" of the nerves.

He described a sanguineous gout frequent in the springtime, especially among young people with acutely inflamed joints, the pain being most severe in the mornings and the urine red and dense. This is evidently acute rheumatic arthritis. Bilious gout occurred more among the middle-aged and the involved joints were yellow rather than red and the pain attained its maximum intensity in the early afternoons. The urine was lemon yellow in color but often cloudy. The third form was pituitary gout which occurred particularly in the winter, having as a main symptom coryza, affecting the old rather than the young, but usually without acute pain. The affected area is cold rather than hot to the touch and the discomfort is most noted during the night. The urine was pale in color and thick. {399} Melancholy gout, the fourth form of the disease, was also an affection of old age, producing a livid color in the joints and making them cold to the touch. The patients' pains were worse at intervals of three or four days and the urine had a deep cloudy color. Sanguineous gout was the most curable of these four and usually lasted two to three weeks; bilious gout was much more serious and often ended in death. Pituitary and melancholy gout were chronic diseases of long duration. It is rather easy to see Pare's powers of observation in all this. He jumped to conclusions and over-generalized, as men have always done and thus made mistakes. Down even to the present day, however, physicians have never quite got away from the tendency to group these acute and chronic painful conditions of joints under a single word, and rheumatism for many represents the key to a puzzle that still exists.

An important development in medicine was the publication early in the sixteenth century of regulations by the Bishop of Bamberg and the Elector of Brandenburg, by which physicians or midwives were authorized to be summoned as experts in medico-legal cases. Medico-legal autopsies are on record long before this, though there was always serious objection to their performance because of the natural feeling of deterrence men have toward the destruction of the human body. In general, however, the basis of our legal medicine and the status of the physician in court as an expert was determined at this time.

Probably nothing shows so well the great interest of this time in the development of medicine and particularly therapeutics, as the number of drugs imported from America and the East Indies, the many experiments and careful observations made with them and the books written about them. As a matter of fact no century has given us more new drugs of enduring value. Schaer in the chapter on the history of pharmacology and toxicology in modern times in Puschmann's "Handbook of the History of Medicine" has summed up the work of this period. Three well-known books of the time containing interesting scientific material were written by Gonzalo Fernandez, a personal friend of Columbus who, from his birthplace, is often known as Oviedo, Nicolas Monardes and Francisco Hernandez. Fernandez was the superintendent of the {400} government gold mines in South America, but after his return he wrote his great work, "Historia General y Natural de las Indias." The second of these, Monardes, deserves well of pharmacology and all that relates to drugs through his famous collection of the natural products of America which became widely known through his description of them. [Footnote 39] Hernandez wrote on Mexican and Central American plants and his "Historia Plantarum Novae Hispaniae" is an important source of information. Besides these, Pasi and Conti, Italians who had travelled in the East Indies, wrote books containing valuable observations on Oriental drugs and plants, and the Frenchman Bellonius (Pierre Belon) (See chapter on Biological Sciences) described Arabian, Persian and Indian products, while the Spaniard, Christobel Acosta, and the Portuguese, Garcia da Orta and Duarte Barbosa, visited various parts of the East and East African Malabar and wrote books which, while not specifically medical, had much to say with regard to the indigenous plants, especially such as either had been used by the natives for medical purposes or promised to be of significance in this way. The Portuguese apothecary Pirez directed a special letter with regard to Hindustan and Farther India and what might be expected for pharmacology from these regions to the king of Portugal which is of great importance.

[Footnote 39: Monardes proved of so much interest that he was translated into English before the end of the sixteenth century, and his book was widely read.]

The Belgian, Charles de l'Esclus, better known as a rule under his Latin name of Carolus Clusius, as professor of botany, director of the botanical garden and superintendent of the Museum in Vienna and later in Leyden, gathered together an immense amount of information, was in correspondence with all who were interested in botany and in pharmacology. He succeeded in making an encyclopedia of information with regard to these subjects that has ever since been considered one of the most important fundamental works in the history of this department of science.

The spirit of the physicians of the time as regards scientific methods in clinical medicine and their attitude towards {401} observation as by far the most important means of obtaining medical truth is very well brought out by some passages written by John Hall, a poet and medical writer who wrote a translation of Lanfranc's "Chirurgia Parva" published shortly after the close of Columbus' Century. To this was appended "A very Frutefull and Necessary Briefe Worke of Anatomie" and "An Historiall Expostulation: against the beastlye Abusers, both of Chyrurgerie and Physyke in our Tyme: with a Goodlye Doctrine and Instruction Necessarye to be marked & folowed of all Chirurgiens." In the Expostulation, which may be found in the Percy Society's republication of old texts for 1844, Dr. Hall said: "Galen also hath freely admonished that we ought not if we will be perfectly cunning to trust only to doctrine written in books, but rather to our proper eyes which are to be trusted above all other authors, yea! before Hippocrates and Galen."

It is this trusting to observation rather than books that is, of course, the key-note of clinical medicine and of medical progress. The men of this time are often blamed for not having trusted to their observation more and to their books too much. There is no doubt that some of them erred rather seriously in this matter. Yet at all times in the history of medicine the great majority of physicians have not observed for themselves, but have taken their observation at second hand from others. Hall has insisted over and over again that as regards surgery the necessity for observation was extremely important. In the chapter on Surgery a quotation from his Expostulation on this matter will be found.

Even in the department of mental diseases there were distinct contributions to the problems of this intricate specialty of great value. This is not so surprising, for above all the men of the Renaissance could see things for themselves and describe what they saw. Shakespeare represents the Renaissance in England and no one has ever succeeded so well as he in describing forms of the milder mental diseases as they occur in characters like Ophelia or King Lear. Paracelsus even attempted what has not been achieved yet, a definition of the insane person. "The person is sick in mind in whom the reasonable and unreasonable spirit are not present in proper {402} proportion and strength." He distinguished fools "who are animals without any sense" from the imbeciles and idiots "who are deranged beasts." His contemporary, Montanus, who was professor at Padua, and has been called the second Galen, treated of melancholy in his medical consultations and ascribed its etiology to intemperies cerebri. He recommended treatment by water, by venesection and by hellebore. Jean Fernel divided melancholy into what we now know as melancholy in the proper sense of the word and mania. He considered that both affections were due to disturbances of the fluids of the brain. Jodocus Lommius differentiated between delirium, phrenitis, melancholia and mania and described a particular variety of this last form as hydrophobia. William Rondelet, Professor at Montpellier, frankly abandoned all metaphysics in this subject and considered that melancholia was due either to a defect of the brain or to some disturbance of the body which brought about a sympathetic derangement of the brain, the stomach particularly being likely to do this. He gave a rather striking picture of the fixed ideas that take possession of those suffering from melancholia. He differentiated mania from melancholia by saying that the melancholia was due to a frigid humor, while mania was due to the malignity of the thin and bilious humors of the body. His contemporary, Francis Varreliora, described cases in which insanity had occurred as a consequence of love troubles and in which the cure of melancholy came about through the successful treatment of an affection such as haemorrhoids that had been disturbing the patient for a good while. It was a good many generations before medicine advanced very far beyond the ideas that were put forward by these physicians of the Renaissance in discussing their mental cases.

The extent to which balneotherapy was appreciated in this century may be realized very well from the fact that just after the close of it Winternach mentions some seventy-five places in Europe where there were bathing establishments. About the same time Dr. Ruland of Regensburg, published a monograph of twenty-eight pages containing an alphabetically arranged list of diseases with the indication of the particular watering place that would do them good. Indeed just after {403} the close of Columbus' Century there is abundant evidence of the very great revival of interest in the old hydrotherapeutic methods which had taken place during the Renaissance.

One of the most interesting things about the medicine of this century, that is often not appreciated, is that it did not go to that excess in the employment of certain means of treatment to which some of the succeeding centuries unfortunately did. Columbus' medical contemporaries corrected the Arabian abuse of polypharmacy, which had a tendency to manifest itself over and over again during the later Middle Ages in spite of the well directed efforts of thoughtful physicians to suppress it. The diffusion of a knowledge of the classic authors in medicine did more than anything else to secure its eradication at this time. Physicians used bleeding, but not in every case, as came to be the custom later, and not to the excess in which it was employed at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Poor Mirabeau, the orator of the French Revolution, under the best French skilled care a century ago, was bled some eighty ounces in the course of forty-eight hours. Under the impetus given by Basil Valentine's "Triumphant Chariot of Antimony" they used antimony frequently, but not at all to the extent that it was employed in the eighteenth century. Purgatives were much more abused in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than during Columbus' Century. Under the immediate influence of the Greeks the physicians of this time were thoroughly conservative, and there is as little of regrettable therapeutics to be chronicled as at any time in the world's history.

Jerome Cardan of this time is one of the geniuses of the history of science whose career is extremely difficult to understand. His mixture of credulity with a genuine scientific temper of mind that tests everything by experiment, combined with his wonderful ability in mathematics, adds to the difficulty of understanding him. He was a great believer in dreams but then that was because he was sure that so many of his own dreams had come true. He was a serious student of all the borderland subjects between spirit and matter and constituted a Psychic Research Society in himself, but with the tendency to accept the marvellous on general principles. He {404} heard that instruments which had been magnetized could be used for surgical operations without producing pain and having tried some experiments in the matter he announced this as a great discovery. He was sure that he had the power to magnetize others in such a way as to prevent pain, but, after all, it must not be forgotten that in these he only imitated what has attracted much attention at many times in the history of medicine and electricity. As the publisher of the formula for cubic equations he has a distinguished place in mathematics, and he was looked upon as one of the great thinkers of his time. His contributions to medicine, and the estimation he secured for the profession by his popularity among the great ones of Europe at this time, have made his life most interesting to our generation.

Cardan's almost infantile absurdities have sometimes been cited as indicating a lack of the critical scientific spirit at this time. Anyone who recalls, however, the attitude of mind of some of the most prominent scientists of our time towards certain questions, as, for instance, vaccination, spiritism, and even phrenology and other psychic subjects, will not be likely to accept any criterion of lack of the critical faculty that might be set up arbitrarily, because a scientist exhibited a tendency to accept some things without as absolute proof as other men demand. Nearly all the great scientists had certain peculiarities in this regard and Cardan is only an exaggeration of this tendency. His absurdities have sometimes been quoted as if they represented common opinions of the learned men of this time and exhibited their lack of critical judgment, but no one has scored Cardan's absurd opinions more severely, nor called attention more emphatically to the fact that this great scientific genius accepted some childish trivialities, than his contemporary, Scaliger, who so often entered into controversies with him.

An instructive contrast to some of Cardan's absurdities is a little book that has been a classic ever since in popular medicine, Louis Cornaro's "Means of Obtaining a Long and Healthy Life," which was published at this time (Padua, 1558). Editions of it have been issued in nearly every generation since. Cornaro, to give a sentence or two from Addison's essay {405} on the volume "was of an infirm constitution till about forty, when by obstinately persisting in the Rules recommended in this Book, he recovered a perfect state of health, insomuch, that at four-score he published this Treatise. He lived to give a fourth edition of it, and after having passed his hundredth year, died without pain or agony, like one who falls asleep. This Book is highly extolled by many eminent authors, and is written with such a spirit of cheerfulness and good sense, as are the natural concomitants of temperance and virtue."

The little book insists very much on temperance in eating and drinking and is quite as sensible in its way as any popular book on medicine ever written. It is a living proof that in spite of the popular medical delusions of many kinds so frequent in this period, though not more frequent than they are in our own, men of sense could view the question of right living from the proper standpoint and give good advice with regard to it. In the preface to the latest American edition (New York, 1912) the publisher said: "The methods followed by Cornaro and the recommendations and suggestions submitted by him can be compared to advantage with the teachings of authorities of the present day, such as Metchnikoff. The book is now presented to the American public, not only as a literary and scientific curiosity, but as a manual of practical instruction." [Footnote 40]

[Footnote 40: The first American edition, annotated by Mason L. Weems (Philadelphia, 1809), had with what might be thought characteristic American enterprise Benjamin Franklin's "Way to Wealth" as an Appendix.]

It is interesting to bring together some of the sanitary regulations of this period because it is often presumed that it is only in our time that public care of the health has come to be recognized as a duty of the civil authorities. Wickersheimer in his "Medicine and Physicians in France, at the Time of the Renaissance," [Footnote 41] has gathered a number of the details. It was forbidden butchers in Paris to keep meat for sale more than two days in winter or thirty-six hours in summer. Hotel keepers were not allowed to kill their own meat because, as {406} they could cook it before selling it, it was easy for them to "dissimulate bad meats." Restaurateurs were forbidden to serve meat which had been warmed over or warmed-over soup or vegetables. Fish was guarded particularly by detailed regulations and heavy fines were inflicted for its sale, except under conditions that must have assured its absolute freshness. Butter and fish could not be sold in the same shop. It was forbidden to put coloring matter in butter, no matter what the form of color material used, and also to mix old butter with new. The sellers of spices were required by Louis XII to watch over the absolute cleanness of their mustard mills and to employ as workmen only those who were clean and in good health. Similar regulations existed for the bakers. In a word, they anticipated in many ways the pure food laws of our time. Unfortunately these regulations were allowed to fall into abeyance during the neglect of social order that characterized the notable degeneration of the eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries.

[Footnote 41: "La Medicine et Les Medecins en France a l'Epoque de la Renaissance," Paris: Thesis 1905.]

Some of the popular hygiene of the time is very interesting and distinctly foreshadows practices of our own time. Erasmus gave directions to students for cleanliness. The hands were to be washed after each meal; a practice rendered necessary by the absence of forks and the nails were to be cut and cleaned every week. Gums and teeth were to be rubbed with a rough towel every day according to Montaigne, and various tooth powders were commonly employed. The feet and the hair ought to be washed at least once a week. Among foods, sea-fish were preferred to river fish and the livelier the fish the better it was liked. Shellfish were recommended by some and deprecated by others. Lobsters were usually counted difficult of digestion, and oysters and other shellfish shared in this prejudice. Popular traditions as to food were quite like our own. Peas were very much praised as an article of diet, spinach was considered to be good for torpid liver, water cress was said to have a favorable action on the bowels and lettuce as well as most of the material for green salads was declared to be sedative in action. Cucumbers were indigestible unless cooked, melons must be ripe and soft and without any spots in them or they were dangerous, and cabbage and onions were {407} praised or blamed as articles of food according to the particular part of the country from which one came.

Even in the matter of drinks opinions were not so different from those which are held at the present time, though there was just as much disagreement as regards their effects as we are accustomed to. In Normandy, where apples were common and cider a familiar drink, cider was considered to be much better for men than wine. In the middle and South of France, however, wine was considered of the greatest value for health, and white wine was considered to be diuretic while red wine was recommended for diarrheic conditions. Wine was declared to be much more wholesome as a drink than water and there is no doubt at all that in this our colleagues of that time were eminently justified by their observations. Any water in the neighborhood of cities or considerable centres of population was almost sure to be contaminated by sewage of some description and to be distinctly dangerous. Wine was ever so much less likely to be followed by disease than water. There were many who recognized how much of evil was done by the abuse of wine however, and Renou declared that in that century wine had killed many more people than the sword. He declared that the abuse of wine led to degenerations of the brain and the liver, disturbances of the nerves, brought on tremors, convulsions, even paralysis, and was active in the production of dyspnoea and other serious conditions.

Dr. Cramer calls attention [Footnote 42] to the fact that in 1481 the republic of Lucca in Italy elected three citizens to serve as a board of health. They were given plenary powers to act in case of epidemics. Their main purpose was to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. For this purpose they kept in touch with other countries, so as to be forewarned of places where epidemics were raging, and they had the right to forbid entrance into Lucca of persons, animals or goods until after a sufficient delay to insure the absence of infection or thorough disinfection. The word quarantine of course is very old, though often the idea is supposed to be new, and there seems no doubt that in most of the Italian cities health boards and health regulations anticipating many supposedly modern developments were in existence. There is even question of {408} the contagiousness of tuberculosis having been recognized at this time, and measures taken to prevent its spread. We know that scarcely more than a century after Columbus' period every principality in Italy has laws declaring tuberculosis contagious and regulating it.

[Footnote 42: Revue Medicale de la Suisse Romaine. 1914, XXIX, No. I.]

Sir Thomas More in his "Utopia" has a very curiously interesting paragraph with regard to the status of physicians in his ideal Republic, which shows what his own idea of the place of medicine in the world is. His long friendship with Linacre might very well have been expected to give him such a high estimation of the physician. It is all the more interesting because he expresses depreciation of his own profession of the law in "Utopia." What is striking in this passage is his recognition of the lofty place that medicine deserves to hold in the intellectual world as a department of philosophy and science. He emphasizes the fact that the less people need physicians the more they appreciate them, thus anticipating the modern idea that prevention rather than cure is the great basis for prestige in medical science. His fine tribute to the honor that medicine should have in the estimation of men will make his words a fitting close to this chapter on medicine in Columbus' Century.

"One of my companions, Thricius Apinatus, happened to carry with him some of Hippocrates' works and Galen's 'Microtechne,' which they hold in great estimation, for though there is no nation in the world that need physic so little as they do, yet there is not any that honors it so much; they reckon the knowledge of it one of the most pleasantest and profitable parts of philosophy, by which as they search into the secrets of nature, so they not only find this study highly agreeable, but think that such inquiries are very acceptable to the Author of nature; and imagine, that as He, like the inventors of curious engines amongst mankind, has exposed this great machine of the universe to the view of the only creatures capable of contemplating it, so an exact and curious observer, who admires His workmanship, is much more acceptable to Him than one of the herd, who, like a beast incapable of reason, looks on this glorious scene with the eyes of a dull and unconcerned spectator."

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XIII. SURGERY

Ordinarily it is assumed that surgery has received almost its only and its greatest development in our time. Probably no development of knowledge that has come to us in the recent revival of interest in the history of medicine has been more surprising than the finding that surgery had several periods of great progress before our time. One of these and the most important came during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Another great phase of surgical advance, after a period of decline such as seems inevitable in all human affairs, occurred during the Renaissance. It had its origin in or at least was greatly influenced by the publication of the chapters on surgery in the Latin and Greek classics, though strange as that may sound to modern ears even more was probably accomplished for surgical development by the printing of the text-books of the later mediaeval surgeons. The new impetus thus given affected nearly every phase of surgery and accomplished ever so much more than we would be likely to think possible, only that the republication of old surgical text-books in recent years has proved such a revelation to us.

As I have said in preceding chapters, one of the greatest debts of the modern time to the Renaissance is due for the printing of old books in the early days of printing. Scholars were willing to give liberally of their time and to devote patient labor to secure a good text for the printers, and somehow or other great printers succeeded in bringing out usually in magnificent editions, though of small size as regards the number of copies, not only the ancient but what we have now come to recognize as the mediaeval classics of medicine and surgery. The chapters on surgery in such writers as Aetius, Alexander of Tralles and the Arab writers like Abulcassis are among the most important contributions to the medicine of {410} their time. The text-books on surgery of such men as Theodoric, Hugo of Lucca, the Four Masters, William of Salicet and Guy de Chauliac are landmarks in the history of a great surgical era. All of these were reprinted usually in magnificent editions during Columbus' Century. Without such reprinting at a cost of time and money that we can scarcely understand, many of these precious treasures of the history of medicine and surgery would almost surely have been lost. Certainly very few of them would have remained in the manuscript forms in which they then existed and at most, only in seriously mutilated conditions. There have been several centuries since when they would have been utterly neglected, for almost no hint of their value survived and there was an impression prevalent that no one knew anything either about medicine or surgery during the Middle Ages at all worthy of preservation. This publication of the old text-books gave an impetus to the surgeons of the time that brought about a great new era in surgery, though there were other important factors at work in producing this. Above all the development of anatomy made for a corresponding development in surgery and by increasing men's knowledge of the tissues through which operations had to be made, added to their confidence and decreased the mortality of surgical intervention. The magnificent hospitals of the time are of themselves the best possible evidence of proper care for patients, not alone in a medical, but also surgical way. It cannot be too often repeated that whenever hospitals are well built, properly cared for and suitably maintained, there is sure to be good medical practice and a fine development of surgery; whenever hospitals are neglected, medical and surgical practice both sink to a very low standard. Hospital construction reached a very high plane during the Renaissance period, only to sink afterwards, as did every other constructive effort for humanitarian purposes, to what Jacobsohn, the German historian of hospitals and care for the ailing, calls an indescribable level of degradation. Literally, the worst hospitals in the world's history were erected at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Hospital organization and maintenance inevitably sank in the same way. A corresponding decadence in medical and surgical practice could {411} not help but occur,--fortunately to be followed by the progress of our own time. There are many, however, who seem to think that because the twentieth century is so far ahead of the early nineteenth it must be correspondingly in advance of preceding centuries. This assumption constitutes the most important reason for the very common failure in our time to understand properly the history of medicine and surgery as well, indeed, as that of every phase of science.

This was the period when gunpowder began to be used extensively in the operations of war and it is not surprising that a great deal of attention was given to gunshot surgery. We have four books, treatises in their way on gunshot wounds, that were written at this time by men of large experience. They made mistakes of course, there is no period in the world's history, even our own, when men have not made mistakes, but the surgeons of Columbus' Century accumulated an immense number of observations and gradually worked out a rather valuable set of suggestions with regard to the treatment of various kinds of wounds. At the beginning of the century they made the mistake of thinking that bullets caused both poisoned and burned wounds, and they were over-anxious to treat these imaginary consequences rather than the mechanical effects produced in their passage. They gradually worked out their problems however, even using experiment in order to show the effects of wounds. Braunschweig, Felix Wuertz, De Vigo and Ferri are the classics of the time on gunshot wounds and their books have probably been more read in our generation than in any other since the end of the sixteenth century. Nothing is indeed more surprising than the recognition of the value of the observations made by these old-time surgeons which has come in the last twenty years.

The greatest of the surgeons of Columbus' Century is the Frenchman, Ambroise Pare, who has come to be spoken of as the Father of Modern Surgery. He well deserves the title if we restrict it definitely to the modern time and do not conclude, as so many do, that there had been no surgery since the classical period, for, of course, there was a very great era of surgery during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but as is the way with humanity a period of decadence occurred, {412} followed by another upward phase in the curve of history of which in his time Pare is the apex.

It is to him that we owe the treatment of gunshot wounds by simple water dressings, or at most by aromatics. When he began his work they were treating gunshot wounds as if they were poisoned and burned wounds by pouring boiling oil along the track of the bullet. Pare ran out of oil on an historical occasion but found that the wounded left untreated recovered with less pain and complications than those subjected to the heroic remedy. He recognized the mistake and had the genius to correct it properly. He reinvented the ligature, though, of course, it had been in use a number of times before and had gone out because of the tendency to produce sepsis involved in it, and because so often secondary hemorrhage occurred from the coming away of the ligature in the suppuration which ensued. He deserves, as do several others, the credit of real invention in its use. Pare himself speaks of this discovery, which he made just at the close of Columbus' Century, as an inspiration which came to him through Divine Grace.

In nearly every department of surgery Pare left his mark. He was a thoroughly practical surgeon. He suggested, as did also Maggi, the Italian surgeon at this time, exarticulation as an important mode of amputation. This consisted of the removal of an injured limb or a gangrenous member at the joint just above, because in this way there was less danger of complications and a better stump could be obtained for subsequent use. In order to demonstrate that gunshots did not make a burned wound he demonstrated that when balls are fired even into a bag of gunpowder it does not explode. Maggi [Footnote 43] independently made this same observation but went further and showed also that shot do not melt when they strike a hard surface and that balls of wax that are fired do not spread out {413} as if the wax were melted. This series of experiments made to demonstrate certain valuable points in gunshot surgery is quite worthy of the most modern time and indicates well the thoroughly scientific spirit that was abroad at this period. Pare also suggested that cut tendons should be sewed, the ends being carefully brought together and that no portion of the tongue should be removed after injury, but the parts should be brought together, for there was great power of healing in this organ. He advised the cutting of the uvula with a ligature gradually made tighter and he, as well as Franco, devised an apparatus to fill up the cleft in the bone of a defective palate and other similar mechanical appliances.

[Footnote 43: Anyone who doubts the ability of the men of this time to discuss a practical scientific question from a thoroughly scientific standpoint with experimental demonstrations and close reasoning, should read Gurlt's account of Maggi's experiments with gunshot, and the German surgeon's comparison of the conclusions of this colleague of the early sixteenth century with the facts brought out by the discussion of the same subject after the Franco-German War of 1871 and the experiments which were made just afterwards along the same line.]

Indeed from the mechanical side of surgery Pare is the most interesting. Orthopedics, that is the treatment mechanical and surgical of deformed children, in order to bring about their cure or at least the lessening of their deformity, is generally supposed to be new, but there are many suggestions for it in the Renaissance period. Helferich in his "Geschichte der Chirurgie" in Puschmann's "Handbuch" says, for instance, that Pare's orthopedic armamentarium was rather extensive. He used various apparatus and specially designed shoes with bandages in order to bring on the over-correction of club foot. He treated flat foot in various ways and particularly by the use of special shoes. He invented a corset with holes in it for ventilation to be worn for various torsions of the spine and other spinal deformities. He and Fallopius taught the value of resections for joint troubles of various kinds and even for deformities. Pare declared that genu valgum, that is knock-knees, were due to similar causes as those which produced club foot, or at least that the affections were related.

A very interesting incident in his experience is related by Pare in his memoirs with regard to one of these surprising cases of deep injury to the brain which seem inevitably fatal, yet the patient survives. It is, as suggested by Dr. Mumford, a replica of the well-known Harvard crowbar case, the most famous in American surgery, in which a quarry man recovered from his injury in spite of the fact that a tamping iron had passed completely through his head from beneath the chin upwards, coming out through the top of the skull. {414} The specimens from the case, secured long afterwards at the time of the man's death, may still be seen in the Harvard Museum. Pare's case was very similar but concerns a very important individual. Francis of Lorraine, Duke of Guise, was wounded before Boulogne, "with a thrust of a lance, which entered above the right eye, towards the nose, and passed out on the other side between the ear and the back of the neck, with so great a violence that the head of the lance, with a piece of wood, was broken and remained fast; so that it could not be drawn out save with extreme force with smith's pincers. Yet, notwithstanding the violence of the blow, which was not without fracture of bones, nerves, veins and arteries, and other parts torn and broken, my lord, by the grace of God, was healed." Without the corroboration of the possibility of this by our modern case, it is probable that there would be serious doubts as to it.

The bone surgery of the Renaissance period is particularly interesting. Fallopius declared for the preservation of the periosteum of the bone just as far as was possible whenever there was bone disease or injury. We know now that the periosteum in healthy condition will bring about regeneration of bone, and it was evidently because of clinical observation of the satisfactory improvement that occurred in cases when the periosteum was interfered with just as little as possible that brought Fallopius to this conclusion. Their treatment of fractures was excellent and they secured good results. It was during this time that the older methods of using force in the reduction of dislocations yielded to the maxim that joints should be restored along the same path through which the dislocation took place. A series of surgeons at this time, notably Massa, Ingrassias and Vigo, wrote about spinal disease, describing "penetrating corruption" of the spine, persistent suppuration and the subsequent deformity, using the term "ventositas spinae," and others that would indicate their interest in what we know as Pott's Disease. Vigo described fractures of the inner table of the skull when the outer table is unbroken, and Argelata described depression without fracture as occurring in young folks.

Considerable valuable advance was made in the treatment of fractures of the skull and injuries of the brain. Vigo {415} brought back the use of the crown trephine and did much to make the instrument popular. A great many surgeons invented a variety of instruments for lifting up depressed bone, or for removing fragments, and each one was sure that his particular type of instrument was the best to use. It is interesting to read Helferich's "History of Surgery" in Puschmann's "Handbuch" on these and other points, because they are arranged in the order in which the discoveries and rediscoveries and inventions and reinventions were made. The Renaissance is particularly full of interesting surgical history. The late effects of brain injury, dementia, deafness and various forms of paralyses were carefully studied by such men as Fallopius, Pare and Della Croce.

Various phases of surgery were taken up and discussed that are often supposed to be much more modern. The whole question of the transfusion of blood, for instance, attracted wide attention at this time. Magnus Pegelius of Rostock suggested that the artery of one patient should be fastened directly to the artery of another patient in order to bring about transfusion. The use of this method of treatment, after large losses of blood or in case of anaemia, is mentioned by a number of men. At least as much was hoped for from it as in our time from opotherapy. Jerome Cardan went farther than any in what he looked for from the transfusion of blood. He always saw the possibility of mystical results and his suggestion was that the transfusion of blood might bring about a change in the morals of individuals. It was even said that the use of animal's blood in the same way might bring about an endowment of the human individual with certain animal qualities of disposition. This is quite as absurd yet quite as reasonable as many of our surgical attempts at the reform of criminals by operation on their brains. In 1539 Benedictus noted the occurrence of hemophilia or bleeders' disease. This had been noticed before in the Middle Ages, but had been lost sight of.

With regard to varicose veins the Renaissance abandoned the older methods of operation and suggested the use of bandages. Savonarola, the grandfather of Savonarola the Dominican, who was burnt to death in Florence, described various forms of bandages and suggested rest in the prone position {416} with the feet higher than the head for the relief of discomfort. Savonarola was much interested in the correction of deformities and classifies rather carefully the different forms of gibbosity of the spine, forward, backward and to the side, and suggests their treatment with bandages that may be put on when soft and pliable, but which harden after their application. Pare at the end of the century used a corset made of very thin perforated iron plates which he insisted should be well padded. This should be changed every three months and its shape often altered so as to suit the growth of the body and the changes brought about by itself.

Some of the developments of surgical technique at this time are extremely interesting because they illustrate that accurate attention to detail and inventive ability in surgery that is usually supposed to be reserved for a much later time. Pare, for instance, invented a whole series of special apparatus for nearly every phase of corrective surgery, many of which have been mentioned. Fallopius insisted on bringing the muscles of the neck together and retaining them in position by sutures whenever they were severed, because results were nearly always excellent and function was restored. Every important surgeon of the time emphasized the sewing of severed tendons. Vidus Vidius invented a gold or silver tube to be used after tracheotomy in order to permit breathing through it, and suggested the use of this instrument also after injuries of the larynx. Monteux devised a magnet to aid in the extraction of swallowed iron objects that were caught in the throat.

All the specialties developed wonderfully at this time. The story of the Caesarean operation attests the evolution of obstetrics. In 1500 Jacob Nufer, a veterinarian, performed this operation successfully on his own wife, and a number of others followed the example until within twenty-five years after the close of our period, Rousset counts up his cases of the operation as 15. Gynaecology and obstetrics always develop together, and Weyer, the Dutch physician and surgeon, who did so much to rid the world of the witchcraft delusion and point out its connection with what we know as hysterical manifestations, wrote a text-book on gynaecology, and Caspar {417} Wolff laid the deep foundations of the science of gynaecology at this time. Wuertz, who comes after our period, but was deeply influenced by it, and who must indeed be considered as a follower of Paracelsus, insisted very much on the simple treatment of wounds and emphatically opposed the common custom of "thrusting clouts and rags, balsam, oil and salve into them." Such teaching would have much to do with making advances in gynaecology and obstetrics possible.

Cabrol advised the removal of the breast for cancer and insisted on its complete removal and also of a part of the pectoral muscle, if that seemed to the operator to be necessary, because of actual or apparent involvement. Cabrol also declared that wounds of the heart were not necessarily fatal and gives the details of one which he himself had treated and had afterwards seen at autopsy, death having taken place from another condition. He mentions the fact that stags' hearts had been found in which there were definite indications of healed wounds so that the long-time tradition as to the fatality of heart wounds is not absolute. Della Croce taught that blood or pus or other fluid should be emptied out of the thorax by aspiration. He suggested the use of a cupping glass or a syringe, or in case of necessity even of the mouth for this purpose. He advised the placing of a metal tube in the thorax for drainage purposes. Arculanus advised the opening of empyemata by a perforation of the thorax that would permit drainage. If one had opened spontaneously and become chronic, a lower opening for better drainage should be made.

Nor were they less ingenious in their suggestions as to surgical intervention in conditions within the abdomen. Riolanus explained ileus as thoroughly as anyone has ever done it and recognized exactly what the condition was and the only way by which it could be treated. Pare advised the letting out of gas from over-distended intestines when these could not easily be returned to the abdomen. Fioravanti reported a case of splenectomy with the recovery of the patient. All sorts of bougies for strictures were invented, and many suggestions as to instrumental relief in difficult strictures made.

Savonarola suggested the extirpation of ranula, evidently {418} after having had the experience that the mere emptying of this cyst of the gland beneath the tongue is practically always followed by the refilling of it. He gave the technique of puncture for ascites and has some interesting details of cases, including one in which a fall led to the traumatic evacuation of the fluid with subsequent cure. He recommended the puncture of the pleural cavity for pleural effusion, and above all for empyema whenever the case was in serious condition. A little bit later, Berengar of Carpi, who is usually considered much more important in anatomy than in surgery, discussed the question of fracture of the skull by contrecoup, evidently after considerable experience. He detailed some cases of extirpatio uteri for procidentia and developed the technique of inunctions of mercury for lues. Whether he was the first to do this or not we are not sure. There is no doubt that his practice attracted wide attention. He was visited by patients from all over the world and was summoned on consultations even to great distances in order to see members of the nobility. There probably never has been a more important discovery in therapeutics than the use of mercury for specific disease, and the men of this time to whom must be attributed the development of this phase of therapeutics deserve the highest praise. It required the most careful, patient, prolonged observation, and this was successfully given.

While gunshot wounds were becoming so frequent as to claim much attention, wounds from swords and other sharp instruments causing ugly disfigurements were rather common. Cosmetic surgery attracted attention. It might be thought that owing to their ignorance of aseptic surgery there would be no possibility of any great development of plastic surgery at this time. As a matter of fact, however, not a little was done that was of great significance for the correction of disfigurements due to injury and unsightly congenital defects or scars after disease. A number of procedures for the correction of harelip and of cleft palate have already been noted. Just at the beginning of Columbus' Century the technique of the Brancas, father and son, for the restoration of noses that had been lost by injury or disease attracted wide attention. Their method was to make the new nose from the skin of the arm, {419} lifting a flap from the inner portion of the upper arm, fastening it to the forehead and bandaging the hand firmly on top of the head so as to keep the flap in place, fed by the circulation of the arm until it had obtained a firm hold, when the attachment to the arm was cut and the nose fashioned from the living tissue thus obtained. Vianeo and Aranzi both described methods of forming the nose, and it was suggested that a portion of the skin of the forehead might be used for that purpose. Defects of the lips and eyelids were cured by slipping tissues over and by freshening the edges and bringing them together.

An extremely interesting surgical writer of the beginning of the sixteenth century is Michele Angelo Biondo, sometimes known by his Latin name of Blondus. There are some passages in his writings with regard to the use of warm water as the only proper dressing for wounds that are rather startling. He tells of some physicians of his time who, in place of liniments and all the various applications that are made by the "wax-dealers," simply wash off their wounds with warm water. He adds that these physicians insist that a great many surgical patients are not killed by their disease so much as by the custom of allowing them only small amounts of food and the unfortunate effect produced on them by the applications to their wounds. He adds further that these men are not wont to treat patients suffering from fevers by keeping them on a light diet, but on the contrary they give them wine and nourishing food instead of slops (ptisans). His comment is that this sensible method of supporting treatment unfortunately does not make much headway in the profession. Apparently it was too simple and natural to appeal to the physician of the time. He adds with fine irony, "It is said to be preferable to die methodically than to live empirically."

Gurlt in his "Geschichte der Chirurgie" (Berlin, 1898), to whom I owe most of what is here said of the work of these old surgeons, gives some further details of Biondo's treatment of wounds. After the staunching of the bleeding, the wound was to be cleansed and then covered with oleum abjetinum, very probably oil of turpentine, one part to two parts of oil of roses. With regard to the use of water in the treatment of {420} wounds, Biondo said: "The most experienced of the older physicians held water in such dread that they would scarcely use it in removing dirt from the neighborhood of wounds. I myself, however, having seen the wonderful effect of water in wounded parts, cannot help but be amazed at its super-celestial virtue." In spite of this strong declaration, Biondo in his book gives chapters on all the old methods of treating wounds and the various applications that were supposed to work wonders in bringing about healing. The consequence was that the water doctrine was pushed into the background and probably attracted very little attention. Here was the germ of a great discovery, the use of boiled water, evidently with some experience behind it, and yet it was to remain untried, its true value unappreciated until four centuries later.

Paracelsus, who brought about the revolution in medicine at this time, worked almost as great a change with regard to surgery. At least the principles that he laid down were as startlingly different from much of those accepted in his time and strikingly like those we have come to accept in our time. He insisted that to as great an extent as possible wounds should be left to nature, for there was a definite tendency to cure. He inveighed strongly against meddlesome surgery and declared that not a little of the subsequent complications in wounds were due to misdirected efforts at cure of them. He talked about pestilence due to wounds, and declared that he had seen it spread epidemically from one patient to another in hospital wards. He discussed pyaemia as Wundsucht, that is, an infectious disease produced from a wound. Paracelsus described gangrene and proclaimed its epidemic character. He is the first from whom we have a careful study of the effects of lightning and almost the first who believed that it was possible for a man to be struck by lightning and yet not be killed or even fatally injured.

In general, the ideas of this time were not nearly so distant from our own as some of the intermediate periods have been. Fallopius described union by first intention as resembling that which occurred between two waxed surfaces when they were brought together in parallel lines and adhered. {421} Wuertz described a wound fever, evidently erysipelas, and warned about the possibility of its becoming epidemic.

Arceo, known also by his Latin name of Francisco Arceus, a Spanish surgeon, born near the end of the fifteenth century, illustrates the vitality of surgery in Spain at this time. He has a number of interesting surgical suggestions and has this to say with regard to club foot. The foot should be soaked thoroughly for thirty days in warm water in which some cereal has been cooked. Then the surgeon, taking the lame foot, should exert all his force to put it back into its due position and the form that he desires. This can usually be accomplished without difficulty or delay, partly because of the preceding softening of the tissues, but above all because of the tender age and soft tissues of the child. Then a bandage should be used to maintain the foot in this position until the correction becomes permanent. Ambroise Pare, as I have said, accomplished similar results, but he also used a number of forms of apparatus for the cure of club foot and for the prevention of contractures in the joints as a consequence of paralysis. He is the first surgeon whom we know to have interested himself in artificial hands, arms and legs for those deprived by amputation of members and the first to employ artificial eyes. Fabricius of Aquapendente, born in Columbus' period, but doing his work afterwards, recommends massage and bandaging for pes varus and an iron shoe with side pieces for pes valgus. He made the correction gradual. He said, "I talk from experience, as I have had much to do with crooked legs, feet and backs and have made them straight and proper."

That Germany was not without the distinctive spirit of the time by thoughtful work in surgery is made clear through the writings of Hugo von Pfolspeundt, which were found only a few years ago. In what relates to the mechanics of surgery he made many practical suggestions and inventions. For harelip he suggested that stitches should be placed on the mucous surface as well as on the skin surface, after the edges of the cleft had been freshened in order to be brought closely together and held in coaptation. He also suggested the use of a permanent weight extension for fractures and for certain {422} injuries of the joints. Perhaps his most interesting surgical development for us is a description of a silver tube with flanges to be inserted in the intestines when there were large wounds, or when the intestines had been severed, the ends being brought together carefully over the tube which was allowed to remain in situ. Pfolspeundt said that he had often seen these tubes used and the patient live for many years afterwards. This is an early form of what is known as the Murphy button in our time, though it was not the first suggestion of a mechanical device to aid the repair of intestinal injuries. One of the latest mediaeval surgeons had employed the trachea of an animal as the tube over which the wounded intestines were brought together. This became disintegrated after a while in the secretions, but remained intact until after thorough agglutination of the intestines had occurred.

Pfolspeundt was not an educated man and did not even write his own German tongue with correctness, not to say elegance. He was just a practical devotee of surgery, probably not even a regularly practising physician, and yet his writings show how much there was that he knew of technical details, extremely important for surgical practice, that are usually supposed to be of much later origin. After all, some of our own distinguished surgeons have not been educated men in any sense of the word, and there has sometimes been the feeling that a surplus of information of what had been accomplished just before his time, sometimes deterred the physician, as well as the surgeon, from thinking independently about problems connected with practice and reaching valuable practical conclusions.

Besides Pfolspeundt there are at least two other German surgeons of this time whose writings have come down to us that deserve a place in a history of distinguished accomplishment in Columbus' Century. One of these is Jerome of Brunschwig, whose name is spelled in many different ways, and the other is Hans von Gerssdorff. Brunschwig, or Braunschweig, used to be considered the oldest writer on surgery in German until the comparatively recent discovery of Hugo von Pfolspeundt's manuscript. He published his surgery in 1497, and it went through nine editions in a few years. It {423} contains a number of woodcuts, and these probably helped to give it its popularity.

Brunschwig was very proud of his calling as a surgeon, and quotes what Galen, Rhazes, Abulcassis, Lanfranc and Guy de Chauliac had declared should be the qualities possessed by a surgeon and insisted particularly that he "should have deep knowledge and trained observation of anatomy, so that whenever it may be necessary to cut or cauterize, he shall know exactly in what regions to do it, so as to do just as little damage as possible and that he shall be capable of diagnosing joint conditions and know what important organs may be injured by bullet or other wounds with weapons and be able to judge of the danger of cutting down for their removal." He recommends above all that the young surgeon should invariably call an older and more experienced colleague, or even two, in consultation, if the case is very difficult, and he has doubts about it.

Some of his details of technique are very interesting as showing how carefully he thought out even minor problems connected with the practice of surgery. For instance, he says as to wounds of the face, that as "the beauty of the countenance is what above every other thing makes men beautiful, the surgeon must take the greatest care that no ill-looking or ugly union should take place in it, and just as far as possible the parts should be brought together and kept in apposition, with as delicate means as possible, until healing has taken place."

On the other hand he does not hesitate to discuss even fractures of the breast-bone, and says that if the patient expectorates blood it is a bad sign, for almost surely some of the arteries lying under the bone have been ruptured. He suggests position to help in the correction of deformity and displacement of the bone, and mentions that some of the older surgeons sought to raise it up by means of large dry cups. In fractures of the ribs similar recommendations were made, but Brunschwig was of the opinion that they did more harm than good. He recommended bandages, thickened with albumen, or leather moulded to the part, and he covered the thorax with a large binder.

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There is no doubt at all that he knew very well the books of his predecessors and that he had thoughtfully adapted them in the way that had been taught him by his forty years of experience. He begins his book with a dedication to the praise of God and His Mother, not forgetting the honorable magistrates of the city of Strassburg. He says in the preface that he is tempted to write his book because there are many young, inexpert masters of surgery in the care of wounds who do not understand it and consequently inflict much harm on mankind. He hopes to be able to instruct them and also others who, living in the smaller towns and villages, have not had the opportunity to see the practice of surgery and yet must be able to help the ailing and injured. The picture of the position of the surgeon of the time is rather interesting.

The next of the German surgeons of this period was Hans von Gerssdorff, who practised in Strassburg. His well-known work is the "Field Book of Surgery," in which he gives some of the experiences of long years as a military and municipal physician. The book was issued with a series of woodcuts, some of them anatomical but most of them surgical in interest, which are very well executed. His illustration of an amputation is the first one of this subject ever made, and there are many pictures of his instruments. We have only room to note some of his discussions of subjects usually not supposed to be thought of in his time. He discusses wounds of the liver, especially such as occur from large wounds of the abdomen, and says that if the liver substance itself has been wounded the issue will surely be fatal. If the liver is not wounded, yet appears in the wound, it should be replaced and the external wounds sewed. His discussions of wounds of the deep organs are all in about this same conservative strain.

Gerssdorff has much to say with regard to contractures and anchyloses. When these deformities are to be corrected, the tissues around the joints should be softened by means of embrocations and the rubbing in of old oil, and the contractures gradually overcome by manipulation or by instrumental means. He invented a number of apparatus for stretching such contractures, and four of the large pictures reproduce them. They are partly in the shape of armor or {425} splints so arranged that they can be bent or made straight by means of a screw. There is also a screw arrangement for bringing about extension in various directions. He did not believe very much in going too slowly about the correction, for he declares that most of the contractures and anchyloses can be overcome in a few hours.

In discussing amputations he mentions the use of anaesthetics by the older surgeons, and quotes from Guy de Chauliac the method of anaesthesia employed by him, but he thinks that better results are obtained without the use of such material. He had never employed anaesthetics himself, though he had performed over 100 amputations. Perhaps his Teutonic people were able to stand pain better than the patients of the Latin countries. The refusal to use anaesthetics is very interesting at this time, for the practice gradually disappeared and was forgotten. Gerssdorff warns particularly against the use of opium alone as a means of preventing pain, and Chauliac had done the same thing earlier.

The spirit that the surgeons of the time were expected to have is very well illustrated by a passage from John Hall, written shortly after the close of Columbus' Century in his "Historian Expostulation," which is referred to more at length in the chapter on Medicine. He said, "I would therefore that all Chirurgiens should be learned, so would I have no man think himself learned otherwise than chiefly by experience, for learning in Chirurgery consisteth not in speculation only, nor in practice only, but in speculation well practised by experience."

Dr. Hall made a series of rhyming verses which were meant to be helpful to the young surgeon to enable him to recall his duties readily. He urged him above all never to treat a case unless he understood it, when in doubt to call in a consultant and advises him after consultation to console the patient, but to talk seriously to some of the patient's friends. Above all not to disturb the patient's feelings. Among other excellent bits of good advice he insists very much on the knowledge of anatomy, and two of his rhyming stanzas regarding it seem worth while quoting to show the spirit in which he wrote:

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"He is no true chirurgien That cannot show by arte The nature of every member Each from other apart.

For in that noble handy work There doth nothing excell The knowledge of anatomy If it be learned well."

In a chapter of this kind, almost needless to say, it is impossible to give any formal account of the surgery of the time. All that I have been able to do is to point out that in every country in Europe surgeons were thinking for themselves and facing most of our modern surgical problems and finding not inept solutions. There is scarcely a phase of our modern surgery from antisepsis and anaesthesia to technical details of various kinds, through plastic surgery, the use of apparatus, manipulation and many forms of instruments, which cannot be found in the surgical text-books of this time. Gurlt in his great "History of Surgery" has taken some 400 pages of a large octavo volume, with the excerpts in rather small type, to tell the story of the surgery of Columbus' Century. Helferich occupies several hundred pages of Puschmann's "Handbook of the History of Medicine" with the details of what was done by the period's surgeons. The specialties developed, and in all of them important contributions were made. The great independent, seeking temper of the era is as noteworthy in surgery as it is in every other department of intellectual effort at this time.

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I. LATIN LITERATURE

The Latin literature produced during Columbus' period, or at least the books written in Latin, are literally legion. There has seldom been an age of greater literary productivity, and in every department men wrote in Latin. It was the universal language of scholars. Every educated man understood it; whenever he wrote for educated men he employed it. When scholars of different languages met it was a ready resource. This custom did not begin to lose its hold until after the end of Columbus' Century, though it received a severe shock from Paracelsus' refusal to use anything but the vernacular and was given its death blow by the popularization of even theological subjects in the vernacular during the reformation movement. Latin continued for two centuries after Luther's time to be the medium of communication between scholars, but its use gradually went out in the depths of the degradation of scholarship in the eighteenth century.

There are many who apparently can see only unmixed good in the gradual supersession of Latin by the various vernacular languages, but a universal academic language had many advantages. As a rule, an educated man needed to know only one language besides his own at this time. Practical education for scientific purposes, and above all for law and medicine and philosophy and theology, was very much simplified. Now the student of science must know, as a rule, at least two languages besides his own. In recent years we have come to recognize the need of a universal language, and hence the {428} successive waves of interest in newly-invented languages. Latin, however, besides its practical usefulness as a common tongue, rewarded the student of it by opening up to him a precious literature which made it well worth his while to have devoted time and labor to its acquisition.

The most fertile period of modern Latin was undoubtedly the era of the Renaissance from 1450 to 1550, yet of all this Latin writing of Columbus' Century very little endures in the sense of being read for its own sake in our time. The old books have many of them gone up in value, but that is mainly because of their special significance in the history of their particular science or in the development of printing. Books like Vesalius' "Fabrica Humani Corporis" have become classics that every scholarly student of medicine must have seen, though in practical value they have been superseded by later books. Some of the philosophical and theological works of the period and a number of the mystical and spiritual works are still read for their own sake, but with certain exceptions, like Thomas a Kempis' works and others that we shall mention, these are rather curiosities that appeal to the erudition of the special student than real living books to be consulted.

An immense amount of Latin verse was written at this time. Sannazaro, one of the ablest members of the Academy of Naples, wrote a poem comparable in size to Virgil's AEneid on "The Birth of Christ." This is only one instance. There were literally hundreds of scholars at this time who thought because they could write Latin verses in which the rules of grammar and prosody were not violated, and above all if they could use the words that had been employed by their favorite Latin authors and repeat felicitously the expressions of Virgil and Horace and the classic poets generally, that they were making literature at least if not poetry. Men have always had such illusions, have always written what was only of interest for their own time and have had the pleasure and satisfaction derived from the occupation of mind and the anticipations of reputation and glory. None of this Latin poetry has survived, and indeed it is only a very rare specialist in Latin literature, and usually one who has devoted himself to Renaissance Latin, who is likely to know anything about it. Undoubtedly some {429} of it was eminently scholarly. There is no doubt either that not a little of it was of fair poetic quality. It was all, however, of distinctly academic character, and it has gone into the limbo of forgotten writing, which now contains such an immense amount of material.

There is probably nothing which shows so clearly that the writer, and above all the poet, is born and not made, that it is originality of thought and not mode of expression that makes for enduring literature, as the fate of so much of the product of these Renaissance writers. On the other hand, there is nothing that better illustrates the value of originality of thought apart from style than the preservation as enduring influences upon mankind of a series of books in which style was probably the last thing that the author thought about, and the mode of expression had almost no place in his mind compared to his desire to set forth his thought effectively.

Three of the books that have lived from this time and will, so far as human judgment can foresee, always continue to live, are Thomas a Kempis' "De Imitatione Christi" Sir Thomas More's "Utopia" and St. Ignatius of Loyola's "Exercitia Spiritualia" All three of them were written in Latin because that was the language in which they would appeal to most readers at the time. All three of the authors probably thought nothing at all about the language that they were using except for its convenience for others, inasmuch as it could be read by the men of all nations whom they most wished to reach. All of them are direct, simple, even forcible in their modes of expression, but there was surely little filing done and probably very little rewriting. Thomas a Kempis' book, almost without a doubt, flowed from his pen just in the way that his words flowed out of his full heart in the spiritual conferences that he gave to his brethren. There was probably never a thought given to verbal nicety except to secure as simple an expression of his overflowing ideas as possible. The "Utopia" is written in correct, but not classical Latin, and it is very likely that Erasmus would have found many faults of usage in it, while the Ciceronians of that time would surely have been horrified at the very thought of having to read such Latin and would scarcely be able to understand how anyone could write {430} such unCiceronian phrases. As was said of Michelangelo, St Ignatius wrote things rather than words, and the "Spiritual Exercises" are a mine of thought, but not a model of style in any sense.

There has been question as to whether the "Imitation of Christ" was really written by Thomas a Kempis, but that question has now, I think, been definitely settled. Everything points to the authorship by the brother of the Common Life, who was born in the little town of Kempen and lived some seventy years in the Monastery of St. Agnes, acting as spiritual adviser to his brethren, giving them consolation and advice in times of trial, directing their thoughts always to the higher life. There are many Flemicisms, that is, Latin usages which were common in the Netherlands of this time, in most of the manuscripts. It has been argued that since these do not exist in all the manuscripts, the argument founded on them is not absolute. The preponderance of evidence, however, is for the Flemish copies as being nearer the original, and the absence of these special modes of expression in other manuscripts only indicates that a great many copyists of the time, particularly in Italy and France, were quite aware of these imperfections of language and endeavored to correct them out of their better knowledge of Latin. This only serves to show how little the style of the book had to do with its popularity and that it was the thought that appealed to the world of the time and has continued ever since to give the work wide popularity.

A Kempis himself was born in the fourteenth century, but as he lived to be past ninety, dying in 1471, more than twenty years of his life, during which he was active and in possession of his faculties, were passed in our period. The "Imitation of Christ" was probably written some twenty years before Columbus' Century began, but did not take the definitive form in which we know it until about the beginning of our period. It has a right to a place, therefore, among the great works of the time. I have sometimes suggested that three men, whose names begin with k sounds, accomplished magnificent broadenings of human knowledge at this time. Columbus discovered a new continent, Copernicus revealed a new universe and a Kempis unveiled a wonderful new world in man's own soul. {431} He did as much for the microcosm man as Copernicus for the cosmos or Columbus for our earth. Hitherto unexplored regions were laid bare and the beginning of the mapping out of them was made. More than either of his great contemporaries, however, a Kempis finished his work. Very little has been added to what he was able to accomplish for man's self-revelation in his little book.

The work did not spring into popularity at once, though it gradually began to be known and used by chosen spirits in many places, and some of the greatest of the men of the time learned to appreciate it. It is a charming testimony to the fact that a Kempis himself first did and then taught that he cared so little for the reputation attached to his work, that his name was not directly associated with it, and in the course of time there came to be some doubt about its authorship. "If thou wilt profitably know and learn," he had said, "desire to be unknown." It is one of the most difficult of tasks, but the humble brother of the Common Life who had written a sublimely beautiful book had learned it. He had written other books, indeed there are probably at least a dozen attributed to him on reasonably good evidence, yet had said, "In general we all need to be silent more than to speak, indeed there are few who are too slow to speak." None of his other books are quite equal to the "Imitation," yet many of them, as "The Little Garden of Roses" and "The Valley of Lilies," are well worth reading and exhibit many of the traits of charming simplicity, marvellous insight and psychological power that have given his greatest work its reputation.

All down the centuries since men have admired and praised the "Imitation." It has not been a classic in the sense of a book that everyone praises and very few read, but on the contrary it has been the familiar reading of a great many of the chosen spirits among mankind ever since. To have been the favorite book of Sir Thomas More, Bossuet and Massillon, of Loyola and Bellarmine, of John Wesley, Samuel Johnson, Lamartine, La Harpe, Michelet, Leibnitz and Villemain is indeed a distinction. Nor has it appealed only to Christians, for men like Renan and Comte almost in our own time have praised it very highly. Far from its reading being confined {432} to scholars by profession or those much occupied with the things of the spirit, we find that it was the favorite reading of General Chinese Gordon, General Wolseley, the late Emperor Frederick and Stanley the explorer. George Eliot shows her deep appreciation of it in "The Mill on the Floss," where she says that "It works miracles to this day, turning bitter waters into sweetness." Sir James Stephen speaks of it as a work "which could not fail to attract notice and which commended itself to all souls driven to despair." The late Lord Russell of Killowen always carried a copy of it with him and used to read a chapter in it every day quite as Ignatius of Loyola had done three centuries and a half before. The frequent surprise is the contrast of the men devoted to it. Pobiedonostseff, the head of the Holy Russian Synod, the power behind the Czar for so long, used to read in it every day.

St. Francis de Sales said of "The Imitation," "Its author is the Holy Spirit." Pascal said of it, "One expects only a book and finds a man." De Quincey declared: "Next to the Bible in European publicity and currency this book came forward as an answer to the sighing of Christian Europe for light from heaven." Dr. Samuel Johnson declared that "Thomas a Kempis must be a good book, as the world has opened its arms to receive it." The sentence in it which he repeated most frequently and which evidently had come home to him is "Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be." Matthew Arnold, whose religious views might possibly be thought to bias his judgment with regard to it and whose feeling for style might be supposed to be deterred by its lack of finish in language, called the "Imitation" "The most exquisite document after those of the New Testament of all that the Christian spirit has ever inspired." What may be more surprising to some, he even did not hesitate to add that "Its moral precepts are equal to the best ever furnished by the great masters of morals--Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius."

Some of the expressions used with regard to the "Imitation" are among the most laudatory that have ever been used of any book. They come from men of all kinds, in all generations, {433} in all nations since, and many of them among the most respected of their time. Fontenelle declared the "Imitation" "the finest book ever issued from the hand of man." Caro, the French philosopher, compares it with other books famous in the same ethical line, only to put it on a pinnacle by itself. "Open the 'Imitation,'" he says, "after having read the 'De Officiis' of Cicero or the 'Enchiridion' of Epictetus, and you will feel yourself transported into another world as in a moment." Lamennais declared that the "Imitation" "has made more saints than all the books of controversy. The more one reads, the more one marvels. There is something celestial in the simplicity of this wonderful book." Henri Martin, the French historian, declared, "This book has not grown old and never will grow old, because it is the expression of the eternal tenderness of the soul. It has been the consolation of thousands--one might say of millions--of souls."

Lamartine in his "Jocelyn" (and it must not be forgotten that Lamartine was an historian and a critic as well as a poet) wrote:

"Harassed by an inward strife, I find in the 'Imitation' a new life-- Book obscure, unhonored, like to potter's clay. Yet rich in Gospel truths as flowers in May. Where loftiest wisdom, human and Divine, Peace to the troubled soul to speak, combine."

La Harpe, a dramatist as well as a critic, whose "Cours de Litterature" was a standard text-book for so long, was in prison and sadly in need of comfort and consolation when he began to appreciate the "Imitation." There is almost no limit to his praise of it, and praise under these circumstances must indeed be considered to come from the heart. He wrote: "Never before or since have I experienced emotion so violent and yet so unexpectedly sweet--the words, 'Behold I am here,' echoing unceasingly in my heart, awakening its faculties and moving it to the uttermost depths."

It is not surprising then to find that Dean Church says of it, "No book of human composition has been the companion of {434} so many serious hours, has been prized in widely different religious communions, has nerved and comforted so many and such different minds--preacher and soldier and solitary thinker--Christians, or even it may be those unable to believe." Dean Milman in his "Latin Christianity" declared "that this book supplies some imperious want in the Christianity of mankind, that it supplied it with a fulness and felicity which left nothing to be desired, its boundless popularity is the one unanswerable testimony." He even has some words of praise for a Kempis' style: "The style is ecclesiastical Latin, but the perfection of ecclesiastical Latin of pure and of sound construction." Dean Plumptre, whose studies of Dante and the great Greek poets gave him so good a right to judge of the place of books in the world's literature, is one of the worshippers at the shrine of the "Imitation." The Rev. Dr. Liddon, the great Greek lexicographer, called it "the very choicest of devotional works, the product of the highest Christian genius and one of the books that have touched the heart of the world."

More than this could scarcely be said of any book. Was there ever a chorus of praise quite so harmonious? Did praise ever come from men by whom one could more wish to be praised? Evidently, the "Imitation of Christ" is for all men at all times. It is the poem of our common human nature.

When Sir John Lubbock included the "Imitation" in his list of the hundred best books some people expressed surprise. The editor of the Pall Mall Gazette invited the opinions of his readers on the subject, and some of the most distinguished of English churchmen, as well as many English men of distinction, said their praise of it publicly. Archdeacon Farrar, whose sympathies with the fourth book of the "Imitation" would certainly be very slight and whose opposition to many Catholic doctrines that a Kempis received devoutly might possibly be expected to prejudice him somewhat against it, wrote that "If all the books in the world were in a blaze the first twelve I should snatch from the flames would be the Bible, 'The Imitation of Christ,' 'Homer,' 'AEschylus,' 'Thucydides,' 'Tacitus,' 'Virgil,' 'Marcus Aurelius,' 'Dante,' 'Shakespeare,' 'Milton' and 'Wordsworth.'" {435} The men with whom a Kempis is thus placed in association are among the accepted geniuses of literary history before as well as since his time. It would not be difficult to make a sheaf of quotations each one of them scarcely less laudatory than this of Archdeacon Farrar. They come from all manner of men, devout and undevout, bookish and practical, spiritual and worldly, men of wide experience in life, who have done things that the world will not soon forget, and who, if any, have the right to speak for the race as regards the significance of life and what any book can mean for direction and guidance in the living of it and consolation in its trials and difficulties.

Lamartine in his "Entretiens Familiers" called it "the poem of the soul," and declared that it "condensed into a few pages the practical philosophy of men of all climates and of all countries who have sought, have suffered, have studied and prayed in their tears ever since flesh suffered and the mind reflected."

To adopt his term, the "Imitation" is literally a great poem. It is a creation and it is a vision. The poet is the creator and the seer. The greater he is, the more capable he is of taking the ordinary materials of life and making great poetry of them. The greater the poet, the more of mankind he appeals to. It is the vision of the experiences of man and not of individual men that the poet sees. What all have seen and felt, but none so well expressed is the theme of poetry. The more one reads of the "Imitation," the more one realizes all the truth of this characterization of it as poetry. If one takes passages of it as they have been put into rhythmic sentences the feeling of the poetry in them is brought home very clearly. For instance, this from Chapter XXII of the third book:

"Why one has less, another more; Not ours to question this, but Thine With Whom each man's deserts are strictly watched. Wherefore, Lord God, I think it a great blessing Not to have much which outwardly seems worth Praise or glory--as men judge of them."

Or if the ode--for such it really is--on Love from the fifth chapter of the third book be read alongside one of the great {436} choruses from the Greek tragedians, as above all some of those of Sophocles in "Antigone" or the "Oedipus at Colonos," the lofty poetic quality will be easier to grasp:

"A great thing is love, A great good every way. Making all burdens light, Bearing all that is unequal, Carrying a burden without feeling it. Turning all bitterness to a sweet savor. The noble love of Jesus Impelleth men to good deeds And exciteth them always To desire that which is better. Love will tend upwards Nor be detained By things of earth It would be free.

Nothing is sweeter than love, Nothing stronger, nothing higher. Nothing fuller, nothing better Nor more pleasant in heaven or earth. For love is born of God Nor can it rest Except in Him Above all things created. Love is swift, sincere. Pious, pleasant and delightsome. Brave, patient, faithful, Careful, long suffering, manly. Never seeking its own good; For where a man looks for himself He falls away from love."

The next most significant book of the Latin literature of the time is Sir Thomas More's "Utopia." Few books are more surprising in the midst of their environment. Probably no one {437} has ever so risen above the social atmosphere around him and breathed the rarefied air of ideal social conditions as More in the "Utopia." It was written under the influence of his first acquaintance with Plato's "Republic" and as a result of his talks with that great French scholar and friend of Erasmus, Peter Giles, or as he is known in the history of scholarship, Aegidius. More discussed not merely literary topics, but the application of the Greek literature that they were both interested in to the contemporary politics of Europe and the social conditions of their time. Not yet thirty years of age, More's powers of observation were at their highest, and his principles of life had not yet been hardened into conventional form by actual contact with too many difficulties. With no experience as yet of government and with the highest ideals of fellowship and unselfishness, he wrote out a wonderful scheme of ideal government by which the happiness of mankind would be attained. He saw clearly through all the social illusions and the social problems, and with almost youthful enthusiasm put forth his solution of all the difficulties he saw.

Undoubtedly the "Utopia" is the main literary monument of Sir Thomas More's great genius. Sir Sidney Lee in his "Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century" (Scribner's, 1904) declares that "it is as admirable in literary form as it is original in thought. It displays a mind rebelling in the power of detachment from the sentiment and the prejudices which prevailed in his personal environment. To a large extent this power of detachment was bred of his study of Greek literature." There is, perhaps, no greater series of compliments for the significance of the classics in education than the fact that these men of the Renaissance found in the Greek books not only the source of their literature, but also their art and architecture and even their science, and above all were given the breadth of mind to follow the suggestions that they met with. It must not be forgotten, however, that More was also deeply influenced by St. Augustine's "De Civitate Dei" Evident traces of this can be found. It is known that he had been reading the work of the great Latin father of the Church and that he admired him very deeply. Without any narrowness or bigotry, inspired by Augustine's great work, it was a {438} Christian Republic of Plato that the future Lord Chancellor of England sketched for his generation.

"Utopia" was published at the end of 1516 in Louvain, then probably the most prominent and undoubtedly the most cosmopolitan centre of academic learning in Europe. There were perhaps 5,000 students at the University there at the moment, and it was one of the large universities of the world. A new edition was published only four months later from a famous press in Paris, and within the year the great scholar-printer, Froben of Basel, produced what we would now call an edition de luxe at the suggestion and under the editorship of Erasmus, and with illustrations by Erasmus' friend, for whom More was to be such a beneficent patron later in England--Hans Holbein.

It is not surprising to hear that the book was warmly welcomed by all the scholars of Europe. The epithets which the publishers bestowed on it in the title page, aureus, saluiatis, festivus--a golden, wholesome, optimistic book--were adopted from expressions of opinion uttered by some of the best scholars of Europe. Erasmus was loud in his praise of it, it was warmly welcomed in France, it found its way everywhere among the scholars of Italy, it was read, though not too openly, in England, where there was some suspicion of its critical quality as regards English government and where Tudor wilfulness did not brook critical review of its acts.

The book was eminently interesting; there probably never has been a social Tendens novel before or since that has been so full of interest. The preliminary chapter of the book is, as Sidney Lee says, "a vivid piece of fiction which Defoe could not have excelled." More relates how he accidentally came upon his scholarly friend, Peter Giles, in the streets of Antwerp in conversation with an old sailor named Raphael or Ralph Hythlodaye. This name means an observer of trifles. More takes advantage of the current interest in the discoveries of the Western Continent by making him a sailor lately returned from a voyage to the New World under the command of Amerigo Vespucci. The name America after Amerigo was just gaining currency at that time and this added to the interest. Ralph had been impressed by the beneficent forms of {439} government which prevailed in the New World. He had also visited England and had noticed social evils there which called for speedy redress. The poor were getting poorer, the rich were getting richer, the degradation of the masses was sapping the strength of the country, the wrong things were in honor and social reform must come, it was hinted, or there would be social revolution. The book contained a fearless exposure of the social evils very commonly witnessed in every country in Europe at that time, though tinged more by More's experience in England than anywhere else.

Since its publication, the book has been read in every generation that has taken its social problems seriously. It was not published in England until 1551, but was translated into English again by Bishop Burnet in a form that has made it an English classic. It contains such a surprising anticipation of so many suggestions for the relief of social evils that are now discussed that I have preferred to put a series of quotations from it in the Appendix in order to show how little there is new in human thinking, and above all how a sympathetic genius at any time succeeds in seeing clearly and solving as well the problems of mankind as at any other time, in utter contradiction of the so much talked of evolution that is presumed to bring these problems gradually before the bar of human justice and secure their amelioration. The book is worthy to be placed beside Plato's "Republic," and it will be more read in the near future than probably any other work of similar nature. In our own generation editions of it have been issued in every modern language and a number of editions in English. It is one of the enduring books of mankind that a scholar of any nation cannot afford to confess not having read and in which the social reformer will ever find suggestions for human uplift and the greatest happiness for the greatest number.

The third great book of the Latin literature of the century is St. Ignatius's "Exercitia Spiritualia." This is not a book to be read, however, but to be lived. It is a book of material for thought rather than of words to be conned. It has deeply influenced every generation of men ever since. If it had done nothing else but form all the members of his own order ever {440} since, that would be enough of itself to stamp it as a very great human document. It has, however, deeply influenced all the religious orders both of men and women since it was written, and is now the basis of nearly all of the formative exercises on which the modern religious life is based. It is undoubtedly the work of a great spiritual and intellectual genius who above all knew how to suppress himself. There is not a word too much in it, and the one complaint has been of an abbreviation beyond what would make it readily intelligible. Those who have studied it most deeply, however, find no difficulty of understanding, though they recognize the impossibility, unless perhaps after many years of devotion to it, of comprehending all of its precious significance. It is the directions for the spiritual life in shorthand, and it is surprising that a man should have committed it to all the possibilities of misunderstanding in its present form, but its lack of too great detail makes it all the more precious and leaves that room for the expression of the individuality of the one who gives the exercises that is so necessary.

The fourth book that deserves a place in any account of the Latin literature of this period is Erasmus' "Colloquia" though doubtless some might plead for a place for the "Encomium Moriae," which has had an academic immortality at least. The "Colloquia" is eminently a book for scholars written in the elegant Latin that Erasmus could employ so effectively, and it went through many editions in his lifetime and has had many reprints ever since. It was distinctly a book of style rather than of matter and of academic rather than popular interest. Scholars at all times have turned to its pages for refreshment and information and have been regaled by its charming style and its wit. It is entirely too bitter to be always admirable, but many of its satirical parts give an excellent idea, though undoubtedly exaggerated if taken as a picture of the times, of the conditions of education at the moment. It has not been often translated, and hence, in our generally complacent ignorance of Latin, is less known in our time than in any other since its publication. Its career in comparison with the three other volumes of Latin literature in this chapter, its contemporaries, emphasizes the difference between the place of {441} style and thought in the world literature. The scholars of the period doubtless looked upon Erasmus' book as a very triumph of scholarship, a great contribution to world literature. "The Imitation of Christ," "Utopia" and the "Spiritual Exercises" were read originally not for themselves, but for a purpose. These have maintained an active life, however, while at most the "Colloquia" has enjoyed a rather inanimate academic existence.

This does not detract from the merit of the book, however, nor from that of Erasmus' other contributions to the Latin literature of the time. Latin was at best an adopted language, however, and the expression of native genius in it could scarcely be expected. The prose has been eminently more fortunate than the verse, and it is to the former, not the latter, that we turn in order to find some of the great contributions of the period to world literature.

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II. ITALIAN LITERATURE

As I have said in the Introduction, in spite of the supreme greatness of the artistic products of Columbus' Century, its paintings, sculpture and architecture, the literature of the time was not only not neglected, but occupies a place in the history of culture only second to that of the Periclean age of Athens. For a long time, indeed, the Age of Leo X, as it was called, was considered to be a serious rival in its literary treasures to that marvellous period of Greek thinking and writing. Subsequently the literary world passed through a period of exaggerated critical depreciation of it. There has been, however, a growing tendency in recent years, indeed during the last half century, to restore older appreciation of the literature of this period and to value it highly.

In every country in Europe there were books written during this time which not only will never die, but which are part of the familiar reading of the scholars at least of all time. Not that there are not many popular elements in this literature, but its scholarliness has made it a special favorite, and there are not a few books written at this time which no one with any pretence to education would willingly confess to being ignorant of. Ariosto, Machiavelli, Rabelais, Villon, Sir Thomas More, Erasmus, St. Teresa, Marguerite of Navarre and the Pleiades, as well as the Collects of the English Prayer Book, all these have an enduring significance in the realm of world literature that has brought about the publication of editions and translations of them in every cultivated language even in our generation over four centuries after their original production.

The Italian literature of the century is especially rich. It would be quite impossible to give it any adequate treatment in a chapter, for this is the Renaissance period, and the literature {443} of the Italian Renaissance has been treated in many volumes. The most important of the writers is undoubtedly Ariosto, who has been much more appreciated by his own people than by other countries, though at times of deep interest in literature he has always had a profound influence on writers beyond the bounds of Italy. Saintsbury, in "The Earlier Renaissance," has summed up his best qualities in some sentences that, considering the distance in time and place and temperament which separate poet and critic, may very well be taken as highest praise. Ariosto, he says, "is very nearly if not quite supreme in more than one respect. It may also be said that he never fails and that this freedom from failure is not due to tame faultlessness or a cowardly absence from the most difficult attempts--that it will go hard--but we must rank him, at lowest, just below the very greatest of all. Such a place is, I believe, his right even on the calculus of those who refuse the historic estimate or at least admit it with grudging. It has been said that as Rabelais he represents the greatest literature of his time penetrated most fully by the extra literary as well as the literary characteristics of that time; and it may be added not merely that few times have been so thoroughly represented, but that few have ever so thoroughly lent themselves to representation."

With what is perhaps almost pardonable compatriotic enthusiasm, considering his really great merits as a poet, he has been called the Italian Homer, and his great work, "Orlando Furioso" has been called "the most beautiful and varied and wonderful romantic poem that the literature of the world can boast of." In it are woven together with charming art the two great romantic cycles of Charlemagne and Arthur. It is the poetic apotheosis of chivalry written in wonderful perfection of style and taking form and with marvellous variety of incident. While the great poem has been a favorite rather with the Italians than with foreigners, when one realizes how deeply cultured Italian readers have been as a rule for all the centuries since Ariosto's time, it is probable that no higher compliment than this devotion of his compatriots could be paid to him. The "Orlando" has not been without honor, however, in foreign countries, among those whose opinion is most {444} to be valued. It cast into the shade the numberless poetical romances that had been written during the preceding century. None of the many imitations that it evoked have approached it either in beauty of form or style or in deep underlying human interest. Ariosto knew above all the human heart and had excellent control of pathos. He is especially capable in making the impossible or the improbable seem reasonable. Now, after four centuries, we know that he is of all time and belongs to the culture of all centuries.

Modern readers unacquainted with the writings of the older time are often inclined to think that the interests of the older writers were very different from those of humanity to-day and that, as a consequence, the reading of them would surely be a great bore. Even a little reading of Ariosto would show how eminently human and for all time a classic writer is and how literally it is true that he is often a commentary on the morning paper. One or two of Ariosto's comparisons which show his interest in humanity and in life around him will serve to illustrate this. His observation of children is as close as that of Dante:

"Like to a child that puts a fruit away When ripe, and then forgets where it is stored, If it should chance that after many a day Thither his step returns where is his hoard. He wonders to behold it in decay. Rotten and spoiled, and richness all outpoured; And what he loved of old with keen delight He hates, spurns, loathes, and flings away in spite."

Like Dante, too, he was an observer of animals and noted especially the ways of dogs.

"And as we see two dogs the combat wage, Whether by envy moved, or other hate, Approaching whet the teeth, nor yet engage. With eyes askance, and red as coals in grate, Then to their biting come, on fire with rage. With bitter cries, and backs with spite elate, {445} So came with swords and cries and many a taunt Circassia's knight and he of Chiaramont."

Ariosto's other poems, besides his Epic, are of minor significance. He wrote a series of satires that are rather chatty essays, on subjects literary and personal, in verse, than satires in our sense of the word. Above all, Ariosto took his own disappointments in life good-humoredly, and his optimism would remind one of Cervantes in certain ways. Garnett in his "History of Italian Literature" (page 151) says, "His lyrical pieces are not remarkable, except one impressive sonnet in which he appears to express compunction for the irregularities of his life:

"How may I deem that Thou in heaven wilt hear, O Lord divine, my fruitless prayer to Thee, If for all clamor of the tongue Thou see That yet unto the heart the net is dear? Sunder it Thou, who all behold'st so clear, Nor heed the stubborn will's oppugnancy. And this do Thou perform, ere, fraught with me, Charon to Tartarus his pinnace steer. By habitude of ill that veils Thy light. And sensual lure, and paths in error trod. Evil from good no more I know aright. Ruth for frail soul submissive to the rod May move a mortal; in her own despite To drag her heavenward is work of God."

In Italy the sacre rappresentazioni, as the Miracle and Mystery plays were called, had a distinct period of development, though not equal to that of the English, and good specimens of them have not been preserved for us. We have evidence of the influence of them, however, in the fact that some of the scholarly poets of the time wrote plays founded on the myths of the old Olympian religion after the model of some of these mystery plays. Politian's "Orfeo" is perhaps the best example of this. It was little better than an improvisation composed in the short space of two days at Mantua on the {446} occasion of Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga's visit to his native town in 1472, but it marks an epoch in the evolution of Italian poetry. Addington Symonds has even gone so far as to say that "it is the earliest example of the secular drama, containing within the compass of its brief scenes the germ of the opera, the tragedy and the pastoral play." It contained portions that were to be sung as well as to be spoken, and there are episodes of terza rima, Madrigals, a Carnival song, a Ballata as well as the choral passages that are distinctly operatic. After Orpheus has violated the law that he must not look upon his wife until they have reached the upper world, his complaint is of lyric quality that has something of the Grecian choric ode in it. Addington Symonds in his "Sketches and Studies in Southern Europe" has translated the passages so as to give an excellent idea of the character of the play:

"Who hath laid laws on Love? Will pity not be given For one short look so full thereof? Since I am robbed of heaven, Since all my joy so great is turned to pain, I will go back and plead with Death again!

TISIPHONE

Nay, seek not back to turn! Vain is thy weeping, all thy words are vain. Eurydice may not complain Of aught but thee--albeit her grief is great. Vain are thy verses 'gainst the voice of fate! How vain thy song! For death is stern! Try not the backward path: thy feet refrain! The laws of the abyss are fixed and firm remain."

Addington Symonds has given a number of examples of the popular Italian poetry of the Renaissance [Footnote 44] which show the qualities of this mode of literature very well, and above all illustrate how like in its character it is to the lighter modes of {447} verse at all times and especially our own. Politian, the great scholar whose learning filled the lecture rooms of Florence with students of all nations and whose critical and rhetorical works marked an epoch in the history of scholarship, was able to unbend at times and write ballate, as they were called, though they were very different from our ballads, which were to be sung during the dances in the piazzas on summer evenings. Stanzas from some of these will serve to show their character. The last stanza, for instance, of his May Ballad is on the world-old theme, "Gather ye rose-buds while ye may."

"I went a-roaming, maidens, one bright day. In a green garden in mid month of May.

For when the full rose quits her tender sheath. When she is sweetest and most fair to see. Then is the time to place her in thy wreath, Before her beauty and her freshness flee. Gather ye therefore roses with great glee. Sweet girls, or ere their perfume pass away.

I went a-roaming, maidens, one bright day, In a green garden in mid month of May."

[Footnote 44: "Sketches and Studies in Southern Europe," New York, 1880]

Many of the Italian scholars of the period gave the time to the writing of ballads, and one which has been ascribed to Lorenzo dei Medici is often quoted. In it the word signore, which means lord, is used instead of the name of the lady, because she is the lord of the singer's soul.

"How can I sing light-souled and fancy-free When my loved lord no longer smiles on me?

One only comfort soothes my heart's despair. And mid this sorrow lends my soul some cheer; Unto my lord I ever yielded fair Service of faith untainted pure and clear; If then I die thus guiltless, on my bier It may be she will shed one tear for me. {448}

How can I sing light-souled and fancy-free When my loved lord no longer smiles on me?"

These ballads were often on the pagan theme of snatching life's opportunities while one might, a popular expression of the Renaissance time, an echo of Horace's Carpe diem, "snatch the day," which the Roman had taken from his Greek models. Every now and then, however, there is a more serious note in the Carnival songs written to be sung during the revels at the Carnival time, when it is surprising to find such a thought emphasized. One of the best known of these Carnival songs is attributed to Lorenzo de' Medici:

"Fair is youth and void of sorrow; But it hourly flies away. Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Naught ye know about to-morrow.

Midas treads a wearier measure: All he touches turns to gold: If there be no taste of pleasure, What's the use of wealth untold?

What's the joy his fingers hold, When he's forced to thirst for aye? Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Naught ye know about to-morrow."

After Lorenzo's death one of these Carnival songs, to express the grief of his people for him, written by Antonio Alamanni, was sung by maskers habited as skeletons who rode on a car of death, the music to it being that of a dead march. As a contrast to the less serious songs it is worth quoting:

"Sorrow, tears, and penitence Are our doom of pain for aye: This dead concourse riding by Hath no cry but penitence! {449}

E'en as you are, once were we: You shall be as now we are: We are dead men, as you see: We shall see you dead men, where Naught avails to take great care. After sins, of penitence.

We too in the Carnival Sang our love-songs through the town Thus from sin to sin we all Headlong, heedless, tumbled down;-- Now we cry, the world around. Penitence! oh, penitence!

Senseless, blind, and stubborn fools! Time steals all things as he rides: Honors, glories, states, and schools, Pass away, and naught abides; Till the tomb our carcass hides. And compels this penitence."

Strange as it may seem, the Italian prose of Columbus' Century has had a wider vogue and influence than its poetry. Two literary springs in prose have flowed out of Italy--fiction and history. The greatest of modern historical writers is undoubtedly Machiavelli. His name has been so much deprecated because of the doctrines that he is thought to have suggested that very few people realize what a profound student of human nature he was and how deep was his philosophy. His famous book, "Il Principe" (The Prince), was written within a decade of Columbus' death and at once attracted wide attention. This great political monograph is a calm analysis of the various methods whereby an ambitious conscienceless man may rise to sovereign power. It is usually supposed to be a setting forth of his own absolutely principleless philosophy. As a matter of fact, it is quite as much a lesson in politics for all the world, and while it might be studied faithfully by a man who wanted to usurp sovereign authority in a free state, it contains a series of lessons, which he who {450} runs may read, for all citizens to know just how the downfall of their liberties may be brought about. There probably was never a contribution to political philosophy that has attracted so much attention. It is one of the few books that the serious politicians of all countries and nearly every generation since Machiavelli's time have considered it worth while to read. As a matter of fact, it is esteemed so highly as a human document that it is almost considered a serious defect in scholarship for anyone who claims to be educated to confess ignorance of it.

After a set of discourses on Livy, Machiavelli was commissioned to write the history of Florence. This is the first attempt in any literature to trace the political life of a people, showing all the forces at work upon them and the consequent effects. He places the portrait of Florence on the background of a very striking group of pictures drawn from Italian history. Necessarily, since he was employed at their suggestion for the purpose, the Medici are given a place of first rank and very great prominence. This was not mere subserviency, however, but was a very proper estimation of the role played by that house in the fortunes of Florence. He puts into the mouths of his historical characters speeches after the manner of Livy and Thucydides, and some of these speeches are masterpieces of Italian oratory. His style is vigorous and without any thought of ornamentation, informed only by the effort to express his meaning completely and forcibly. Later he wrote a play which John Addington Symonds, the English critic whose deep knowledge of Italian literature gives his opinion much weight, did not hesitate to call "the ripest and most powerful single play in the Italian language." There may be difference of opinion as to Machiavelli's place in philosophy, and above all in ethics, but there can be no doubt about his genius as an historian and a writer, as a profound student of men and their ways and one of the greatest contributors to political philosophy.

We have come to discount all that has been said in derogation of Machiavelli's personal character, though it must not be forgotten that even in the older time there were men who realized that his book was an essay in political philosophy that {451} made a wonderful revelation and not in any sense a confession of personal opinions. It has been said that we owe the expression, "Old Nick," as used familiarly for the devil, to the fact that Machiavelli's first name Was Nicholas. Sam Butler long ago wrote:

"Nick Machiavelli had ne'er a trick, Though he gave his name to our old Nick."

In our own time some of the men whose wide knowledge and large experience have best fitted them to express an opinion on Machiavelli have been most emphatic in their high estimation of his character and influence. Above all, they have insisted on the enduring character of his work and the fact that it appeals to the essential in human nature, not to the passing fads of any single generation. Two such different men in intellectual training as John Morley and Lord Acton are agreed on this as they could not have agreed on most other things. Morley said that "Machiavelli was a contemporary of any age and a citizen of any country." Lord Acton said that he was "no vanishing type, but a constant and contemporary influence."

Besides a novel, which we quote from later in this chapter, and his political and historical works, Machiavelli wrote a series of plays and poems which are of high literary value. Garnett in his "Italian Literature" says that "he came nearer than any contemporary, except Leonardo da Vinci, to approving himself a universal genius. No man of his time stands higher intellectually, and his want of moral elevation is largely redeemed by his ample endowment with the one virtue chiefly needful to an Italian of his day, but of which too many Italians were destitute--patriotism."

Another of Columbus' great contemporaries among Italian writers was Guicciardini, the Italian historian (1483-1540). Unlike most of the great historians, he was a man of affairs. When less than twenty he was sent as Florentine Ambassador to the King of Spain, and in his early twenties, under Pope Leo X, governed Modena and Reggio with such talent as drew wide attention to him. He was the Lieutenant-General of the Anti-Imperial Army in 1527, later was one of the Eight at {452} Florence, and from 1531 to 1534 ruled Bologna as Papal Vice-Legate. He tells the story of Italy from 1492 to 1534 in great detail. He writes as an eye-witness who had himself been prominent in most of the scenes that he describes. The mass of matter is not allowed to obscure the picture as a whole, and the work has distinct literary value. Probably never in the world's history has such a description of events come from a man who was himself one of the most prominent actors in them. His work has been declared "the greatest historical work that had appeared since the beginning of the modern era" ("Encyclopaedia Britannica").

About the middle of the nineteenth century Guicciardini's hitherto unpublished works were given to the public in ten volumes and served to throw wonderful light on the historian himself. His "Ricordi Politici" deserve to be placed beside Machiavelli's "Prince," and it is easy to understand, after reading them, that Guicciardini regarded his friend Machiavelli somewhat as "an amiable visionary or political enthusiast." There has probably never been a set of human documents that illuminated the heights and depths of humanity so well as these writings of the Renaissance. To read Machiavelli, Guicciardini's "Ricordi," Benvenuto Cellini's "Autobiography" and Rabelais is to see the contradictions that there are in this microcosm man better than is possible in any other way. If we but add Montaigne, who was educated in our century, the picture is complete. These men of the Renaissance saw clearly and deeply into humanity through the lens of themselves. Guicciardini, devoid of passion as well as of high moral standards in personal life, eminently loyal to his patrons at all times, just so far as administration of law went, and unquestionably able, possesses all that ordinarily is assumed to bring the admiration if not the respect of men, yet no one can read his "Reminiscences" without feeling the deepest repugnance for his cynicism, selfishness and distrust of men. Ranke has impugned his good faith as an historian, and his quondam repute is gone. It is this very contrast, as exhibited in his writings, that makes Guicciardini's works as valuable a contribution to the story of humanity as the many masterpieces of his contemporaries.

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One of the writers of this time who must not be omitted, though his merit has not always been recognized, is Vasari, whose "Lives of the Painters" has interested every generation in every country who have occupied themselves much with the great artists. Himself an artist, living on intimate terms with many of the men whose lives he sketched and gathering anecdotes about them and rescuing many a personal trait from oblivion that otherwise would have been lost to posterity, Vasari succeeded in making an extremely valuable as well as interesting book. Some of his anecdotes have been discredited, and he has often been open to the criticism of lack of critical acumen in his compilations of materials, but his industry, his recognition of what was likely to be of interest and his untiring efforts to make his sketch as complete as possible, deserve the recognition which they have obtained. While his style is apparently most artless, he possesses, as Garnett has said, "either the science or the knack of felicitous composition to an extraordinary degree." It must not be forgotten that this apparent lack of art is often the highest art, and so it is not surprising to hear Vasari spoken of as the Herodotus of art. His good taste in art as well as in literature is demonstrated by his admiration for the first fruits of the early Tuscan school which were neglected in his day. He was one of the genial, lovable men of the time who made many friends.

The most popularly interesting phase of the literature of the Renaissance and Columbus' Century for our time is doubtless the fiction that was written so plentifully and so widely read during the period. Whenever a large number of people become interested in reading, after a time more and more superficial reading is provided for them until finally the most trivial of story-telling becomes the vogue. This has happened at a number of times in the world's history. It can be traced in Rome with the decadence, in the Oriental countries, as Burton's edition of the "Thousand and One Nights" shows so clearly, and in our own time as well as during the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Another interesting development is the tendency for the fiction that is popular among the better and supposedly more educated classes, gradually {454} to be occupied more and more with sex problems and sexual questions of all kinds. Whenever many have leisure and a smattering of education, this occurs. It is quite noticeable during the Renaissance period, though a great many good stories were written of excellent literary quality without any tinge of this.

The writing of novels in Italy had begun with Boccaccio in the fourteenth century, and continued with Sacchetti and Giovanni Il Fiorentino. About the middle of the fifteenth century, however, this mode of writing became all the fashion, and the number of novels, though of course by the word novelle the Italians meant a short story, is almost without end. Very many of them have been lost, but a very large number have been preserved. The first of the writers of the time was Massuccio Salernitano, who flourished during the latter half of the fifteenth century and died towards its close. Doni has said of him, "Hail then to the name of Salernitano, who, scorning to borrow even a single word from Boccaccio, has produced a work which he may justly regard as his own." It is to him that we owe the first form of what afterwards became "Romeo and Juliet." Massuccio was a realist and called "Heaven to witness that the whole of his stories are a faithful narrative of events occurring during his own time." Fifty of his novels at least are extant.

Often these novel writers did not attempt any other mode of literature, and indeed not infrequently were not scholarly in any sense of the word, but the next of the Italian novelists of the time, Savadino degli Arienti, was an accomplished scholar and historian. His history of his native city Bologna is still considered very valuable by his countrymen. He entitled his tales "Porretane" because he declared that they had been recited at the baths of Porreto, which was the favorite summer resort and place of public amusement for the Bolognese. The recital of these would be supposed to occupy somewhat the place that moving pictures do now. There is a variety of amusing adventures, witty stories, love tales, and sometimes tragic incidents for contrast. Besides his novels and his history, Ariente wrote an account of illustrious ladies, Delle Donne Clare, dedicated to Giunipera Sforza Bentivoglio, {455} which shows very clearly how the women of the Renaissance, as we have come to know them, were appreciated by their masculine contemporaries very early in Columbus' Century.

After Savadino comes Luigi da Porto. Crippled by a wound early in life, he turned from the army to literature and became the friend of many of the scholars of the time, especially Cardinal Bembo and members of the Gonzaga family. To him we owe "Juliet" in its best and purest form. It is the only story we have from him, but it secured world-wide reputation at the time and has never lost its interest for mankind. Porto was followed by Leonardo Illicini, another writer of a single novel which has been preserved and has gone through a number of editions. Illicini, or Licinio, as his name is sometimes given, was a physician, for a time the court physician to the Duke of Milan, afterwards professor of medicine at Ferrara and one of the distinguished philosophers of the time. Every man is said to have one good story in him, if he only has the time and energy to write it, and Illicini wrote his and attracted the attention of his distinguished friends and contemporaries by the nobleness and beauty of the sentiments which he incorporated into it and which make it a singular exception to the usual tenor of Italian novels.

Like Illicini, Machiavelli, the historian and political philosopher, took it upon himself to write a novel which few people have read and yet which has a certain exaggeration of social satire which sets it rather closely in touch with our time. The story represents indeed a curious ever-recurring phase of the attitude that men are accustomed--for jest purposes only--to assume toward marriage. According to the story, the devils were very much disturbed over the fact that most of the married men who came to hell blamed their coming on their wives. Hell had been well enough so long as people were willing to admit that they were punished deservedly, but society there became very uncomfortable under this new dispensation. The devils resolved to send one of their number up to earth to find out about it. Belphagor, one of the fallen Archangels, having assumed the body of a handsome man of thirty and a large fortune, is commissioned {456} to marry and live with a wife for ten years. He finds no difficulty in getting a bride, having "soon attracted the notice of many noble citizens blessed with large families of daughters and small incomes. The former of these was soon offered to him, and Belphagor chose a very beautiful girl with the name of Onesta." The name, which signifies purity, is evidently chosen for a purpose by Machiavelli, for, while the wife is as pure as an angel, she has more than the pride of Lucifer.

A good idea of the way the story develops can only be obtained by quoting a passage from the translation of the novel:

"He had not long enjoyed the society of his beloved Onesta before he became tenderly attached to her, and was unable to behold her suffer the slightest inquietude or vexation. Now, along with her other gifts of beauty and nobility, the lady had brought into the house of Roderigo such an insufferable portion of pride that in this respect Lucifer himself could not equal her, for her husband, who had experienced the effects of both, was at no loss to decide which was the most intolerable of the two. Yet it became infinitely worse when she discovered the extent of Roderigo's attachment to her, of which she availed herself to obtain an ascendency over him and rule him with an iron rod. Not content with this, when she found he would bear it, she continued to annoy him with all kinds of insults and taunts, in such a way as to give him the most indescribable pain and uneasiness. For what with the influence of her father, her brothers, her friends and relatives, the duty of the matrimonial yoke, and the love he bore her, he suffered all for some time with the patience of a saint. It would be useless to recount the follies and extravagancies into which he ran in order to gratify her taste for dress and every article of the newest fashion, in which our city, ever so variable in its nature, according to its usual habits, so much abounds. Yet, to live upon easy terms with her, he was obliged to do more than this; he had to assist his father-in-law in portioning off his other daughters; and she next asked him to furnish one of her brothers with goods to sail for the Levant, another with silks for the West, while a third was to be set up in a goldbeater's establishment at Florence. In such objects the greatest part of his fortune was soon consumed. At length the carnival season was at hand; the festival of St. John was to be celebrated, and the whole city, as usual, was in a ferment. Numbers of the noblest families were about to vie with each other in the splendor of their parties, and the Lady Onesta, being resolved not to be outshone by her acquaintance, insisted that Roderigo should exceed them all in the richness of their feasts. For the reason above stated he submitted to her will; nor, indeed, would he have scrupled at doing much more, however difficult it {457} might have been, could he have flattered himself with a hope of preserving the peace and comfort of his household and of awaiting quietly the consummation of his ruin. But this was not the case, inasmuch as the arrogant temper of his wife had grown to such a height of asperity, by long indulgence, that he was at a loss in what way to act. His domestics, male and female, would no longer remain in the house, being unable to support for any length of time the intolerable life they led. The inconvenience which he suffered, in consequence of having no one to whom he could intrust his affairs, it is impossible to express. Even his own familiar devils, whom he had brought along with him, had already deserted him, choosing to return below rather than longer submit to the tyranny of his wife. Left, then, to himself, amidst his turbulent and unhappy life, and having dissipated all the ready money he possessed, he was compelled to live upon the hopes of the returns expected from his ventures in the East and the West. Being still in good credit, in order to support his rank, he resorted to bills of exchange; nor was it long before, accounts running against him, he found himself in the same situation as many other unhappy speculators in the market. Just as his case became extremely delicate, there arrived sudden tidings, both from the East and West, that one of his wife's brothers had dissipated the whole of Roderigo's profits in play, and that while the other was returning with a rich cargo uninsured, his ship had the misfortune to be wrecked, and he himself was lost."

Belphagor fled and, having suffered much from his pursuers, finally escapes, and at the end of the novel is having a rather good time at the court of the King of France, where he has entered into possession of the daughter of the King and is attracting much appreciated attention from friends, relatives, courtiers, physicians and the clergy by the acts which he causes her to perform. An Italian to whom Belphagor had confided his secret comes to Court and recognizes the particular devil's activities. He tries to persuade Belphagor to leave his victim, but the demon refuses absolutely. Finally the Italian, catching Belphagor unawares, calls out that his wife is coming after him. With a shriek, the poor devil abandons his victim and is glad to find his way back to hell.

During the first half of the sixteenth century there are a whole series of Italian novelists, each one of them the writer of many novels. One of the earliest of these is Firenzuola, who is said to have been a monk and who was a scholar, for among his collected works are a translation of "Apuleius' {458} Golden Ass," treatises on animals, two comedies, as well as critical and literary work of other kinds. After him came Cinthio, who wrote "Hecatomithi or Hundred Fables." He was a very prolific writer, perhaps the most popular in his own time, with recurring periods of popularity since. His praises were celebrated by nearly all the scholars of the period. His writing was vivid but daring, and the style shows the beginning of that degeneration, from over-consciousness of effort to make it scholarly, so often characteristic of a period when genius is giving place to mere talent. One of his stories furnished the incidents for Shakespeare's "Tragedy of Othello," and this has given Cinthio a place in the commentators on Shakespeare. Another of the Italian novelists whose memory has been frequently renewed for a similar reason was Matteo Bandello, who is often spoken of as the best from a literary standpoint, as he is the most voluminous of the Italian novelists of this period. He is almost the only one of them, besides Boccaccio, known beyond the confines of Italy, and though he was a priest and afterwards a bishop, his stories are as immoral as those of the other novelists of the time.

Indeed, the most important characteristic of all this novel-writing in Italy is that most of the stories were quite without moral qualities, not a few of them were licentious and some of them made their appeal mainly through the liking for descriptions of cruelty to which mankind is apparently always attracted. In our time the corresponding reading is the daily newspaper. The stories of the crime and cruelty of the day before that are told each morning are about of the average length of these novelle as written by the Italian novelists of the Renaissance. There is the same demand for them and they are just as much talked about. For literary quality the novels are infinitely higher than our modern newspaper stories. The interesting thing about these novels of indecency and cruelty is that the claim of their authors at least was that they were written in order to bring about reformation and the correction of evil by spreading the knowledge of it and so making people realize its hideousness. Whenever any excuse is given for our publication of the cruel and immoral details {459} of crime in our newspapers, it follows this same specious line of reasoning. Not a few of the writers of the popular novels were clergymen. Bandello was made a bishop, yet continued his writing of novels. It is perfectly possible for good, well-meaning men at any time to be mistaken in the accomplishment of a purpose, and popularity was as great a bait as the making of money is in our time.

One of the most interesting contributions to Italian prose at this time is the "Autobiography" of Benvenuto Cellini, which finds its place very properly after the fiction of the period. The book has been famous in the modern time, particularly since Goethe translated it, and has gone through many editions in nearly every language in Europe. Long ago, Walpole pronounced it "more amusing than any novel," and it is probably rather as fiction than as genuine autobiography that it must be judged. The style is simple, direct, straightforward, and the wonderful romance has great historical value, for Cellini was in contact with most of the great men and many of the higher nobility of his time, and he has used his experiences as the groundwork of the story. It is hard to tell now how much of it may be true, for Cellini's great works of art would seem to contradict it, in so far as it represents him as a frequent brutal murderer, while the amount of labor that he must have given to the many works we have from him would seem to make impossible that he should have spent quite so much time as his life would hint in light living and idleness, while the affection of his contemporaries and their respect for him in his declining years would seem to be further contradiction. He was evidently one of those men who like to be thought worse than they really are and like so many of the artists of all times who are anxious to produce the impression that their works were flashes of genius and not the result of careful patient labor as well.

One of the books that had a very wide influence at this period and which deserves much more than Benvenuto's romance to be thought typical of the time is Baldassare Castiglione's "Cortigiano," in which the author depicts the ideal courtier or gentleman of the time. The method of presentation is by a series of conversations held at the Court of {460} Urbino among the distinguished persons who frequented it in the time when most of the best-known characters of the Renaissance found their way occasionally up to the little hill town. Castiglione's standard for the gentleman is very high, not only in personal conduct, but especially in intellectual accomplishment. His purpose to draw the picture of a scholar-gentleman, the ideal of an accomplished knight, seemed to his contemporaries to have been successfully fulfilled. The book was widely read. It influenced not only Italy and France and the Latin-American countries, but above all affected the English deeply. Mr. Courthope says that, "Carried to the North of Europe and grafted on the still chivalrous manners of the English aristocracy, the ideal of Castiglione contributed to form the character of Sir Philip Sidney. Augustus Hare in his "Ladies of the Italian Renaissance" (New York, 1904) says:

"Spenser declared that the aim of his book is the same: 'To fashion a gentleman in noble person, in virtuous and gentle discipline.' We might fill a volume with instances of the marvellous influence which the work of Castiglione had upon Elizabethan literature, as we hear it echoing through the sonnets of Shakespeare, Spenser's hymns 'Of Heavenly Love,' Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Burton, the poets and early dramatists, even the grave Ascham; and, amongst later writers, Shelley's 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty' is steeped in the same Italian Platonism."

As a rule, indeed, it may be said that what was best in the literature and art of the Italian Renaissance had a much wider influence than the worse elements in it. It is only in after-times that many of the unfortunately too human contributions to the intellectual life of this period have been revived among scholars and have come to be looked upon as expressive of the spirit of the time. In every movement there are always the lesser men whose notes are discordant and who exaggerate the significance of their own ideas and often exhibit the worst side of human nature. To conclude from them, however, as to the real temper of the time and its influence would be a sad mistake. Castiglione meant ever so much more in the Europe of his day than Cellini. The {461} "Courtier" sank deep into the minds of poets, artists and literary and educated folk of all classes and aroused what was best in those who were influencing their generation. The "Autobiography" was read much more widely, but mainly by people whose influence over others was to be slight, while the poets and writers and artists did not take it very seriously, but spent a leisure hour or two over it as over any other romance, and turned to their work again.

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III. FRENCH LITERATURE

The French literature of Columbus' Century is but little, if at all, below that of Italy in world influence and interest. It was ushered in by that alluring character, the vagabond poet, Villon. He was twenty the first year of our century, and having, providentially for the world of literature, escaped hanging, wrote poetry that has always attracted the attention of poets of every land, and besides has had a popular vogue whenever men have looked beyond their own time and country for literary interests. Few poets of modern times have had among the educated of all countries so many ardent admirers--devotees they might well be called--as Villon. The power of expression of the Renaissance that was just opening was incarnate in him, and no one has ever said better what he sang, though his message was limited enough. His "Ladies of the Olden Time," probably addressed in its epilogue to Prince Charles of Orleans, his poetic contemporary, to whom it is said that he owed his being saved from hanging, is the best known, and is a typical example of his work which reveals the reason for its enduring qualities:

"Say where--in what region be Flora that fair Roman dame, Hipparchia where, and Thais, she Who doth kindred beauty claim? Echo where? who back the same Voice from lake and river throws, Lovely beyond human frame: But--where are the last year's snows? * * * * * * Queen Blanche, white as lily is, Who used to sing with siren strain; {463} Bertha, Alice, Beatrice, Ermengarde who held the Maine, Joan, blessed maiden of Lorraine, At Rouen burnt by English foes. Where are they, O Virgin Queen? But--where are the last year's snows?

Prince, nor in a week or year Bid me where they be disclose. Lest you still this burden hear. But--where are the last year's snows?"

With Villon came Prince Charles of Orleans, of whom we would probably know very little except for the fact that twenty years of imprisonment in an English prison gave him the opportunity for devotion to poetry. His beautiful lines on the death of his wife are a chef-d'oeuvre of mourning poetry and one of the gems of literature. The Prince's appeal to Death as to what has made Fate so bold as to take the noble Princess, who was his comfort, his life, his good, his pleasure, his richness, demanding why it had not rather taken himself, has been often translated. There is another of his little poems addressed to her which has often been quoted and yet cannot be quoted too often:

"How God has made her good to see! So holy, full of grace, and fair; For the great gifts that in her be. All haste her praises to declare.

Of her, what soul could weary be? Each day her beauty doth repair. How God has made her good to see! So holy, full of grace, and fair.

So hither, nor beyond the sea. No damsel nor dame I know. Who can like her all graces show; Only in dreams such thought can be-- How God has made her good to see!"

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One of Clement Marot's shorter poems contains his formula for what constitutes happiness in life. It is the same formula that has been in the mouths of all the poets at all times who have cared to express themselves on the subject, though some critics have been unkind enough to say that it was not always in their hearts--"Happy the man whose mind and care a few paternal acres share." Marot goes somewhat more into detail. His poem is an anticipation of the sonnet of the great master printer of Antwerp, Christopher Plantin, at the end of this century. Because of its many associations it deserves a place here:

"This, Clement Marot! (if you wish to know) Can upon man a happy life bestow. Goods you don't earn, but by bequest acquire, A pleasant wholesome house and constant fire. Hated by none, yourself devoid of hate. And little meddling with affairs of state: A wise and simple life, true friends, and like A good plain fare, with nought the eyes to strike, With all in easy converse to combine: Pass careless nights, not careless made by wine; A wife to have--kind, joyous, chaste and bright; And well to sleep, which shorter makes the night: Contented with your rank, nor wish for higher; And neither death to fear, nor death desire This, Clement Marot! (if you wish to know) Can upon man a happy life bestow."

Francis I was himself a poet, and his poems and letters were collected and published in the first half of the nineteenth century. "In default of a great talent, he had a real passion for poetry," says Imbert de Saint-Amand, and like the Trouveres he liked to make use of the lyre and sword by turns. Sainte-Beuve in his "Portraits Litteraires" declared that "Francis I, from the day he ascended the throne, gave the signal for this puissant labor which was to aid in expanding and definitely polishing the French language. Thanks to the impulse given by him from above, there was soon a universal {465} clearing of the ground all around him." The verses in which he formulated one of the most melancholy and most striking judgments that ever monarch pronounced on the nothingness of the grandeurs of this lower world, deserve to be quoted:

"The more my goods, the more my sorrow grows; The more my honors, less is my content; For one I gain, a hundred I desire. When nought I have, for nothing I lament; But having all, the fear doth me torment, Either to lose it or to make it worse. Tired, full well may I my misery mourn, Seeing I die of envy but to have a good. Which is my death and I esteem it life."

The most important writer in France at this time, however, was undoubtedly Francis' sister, Margaret of Navarre or Angouleme. Her "Heptameron" has been widely read in practically every generation since her own, and though some doubt has been thrown on her authorship of it, it is probable that the age-long attribution to her must remain. The book is about as evil in its influence as any that was ever written. Its author was undoubtedly a saint. She had the best of intentions, and her work illustrates how easy it is for good intentions to go wrong. Hell was paved with good intentions then as now. As I have suggested in the chapter on Some Great Women of the Century, a corresponding mistake is being made by many good women now in the crusade of providing sex information as a protection for the young. Margaret's work is one of the best specimens of French prose of the time. Saintsbury, in his volume on "The Early Renaissance," calls it a very remarkable book which has, as a rule, been undervalued, "presenting almost equal attractions for those who read for mere amusement, to those who appreciate literature as literature, and to those who like extra literary puzzles of various kinds from authorship to allusion."

Margaret's reputation has suffered more than was deserved from the condemnation of the "Heptameron." Her personality merits to be judged rather from the charming poetry of a {466} mystical character which she wrote. Her book, "Les Marguerites de la Marguerite des Princesses," is too well known to be much more than mentioned here. It has a charming grace and an exquisite delicacy. It is the true index to her character. As Imbert de Saint-Amand has said in his "Women of the Valois Court," "Poetry and religion were her two consolers." Her resolution when she looked at her crucifix and burst into poetry was:

"It is my will and firm intent To be no more what I have been, Nor to amuse myself in this poor world. Seeing the griefs that reign there and abound. And which by day and night torment my heart."

There are bursts of piety in her collection worthy of her great mystical contemporary, St. Teresa. The following would almost remind one of St. Teresa's cry, "I die that I may die."

"Lord, when shall come the day I long to see, When by pure love I shall Be drawn to Thee? That nuptial day, O Lord, So long delays. That no content I find In wealth or praise. Wipe from these sorrowing eyes The tear that flows, And grant me Thy best gift, A sweet repose."

The French poetess, Louise Labe, la cordiere, the cord-wainer's wife, as she was called, in reference to her husband's occupation, deserves a place because she represents at once the opportunities even of the lowly born of her sex for the higher education at this time, and her writings exhibit a natural grace and ardent passion that place them in a high rank of lyric poetry. Poetesses of passion there have been a-plenty since, {467} yet it is doubtful if many of them have surpassed much the French lady of the Renaissance from the middle classes. The sonnet form would seem highly unsuitable to us for such passionate expression, but it was the fashion to use it, and Louise Labe anticipates by some three hundred years Mrs. Browning's use of this form for a very similar purpose. One of her sonnets may very well be read beside some of those of Mrs. Browning.

"As soon as ever I begin to take. In my soft bed, the rest which I desire, Forth from my frame does my sad soul retire, And hastes toward thee its eager way to make. Then in my tender heart, ere I awake. The bliss I gain to which I most aspire. The bliss for which to sigh I never tire. For which I weep as though my heart would break. A kindly sleep, O sleep to me so blest, Happy repose, full of tranquillity. Grant that each night I may renew my dream. And if my sad heart, by all love possest. Must ne'er be happy in reality. Yet while I sleep so let me falsely seem."

The humor of the end of Columbus' Century is very well illustrated in some of the epigrams of Melin de Saint Gelais, like Marot, the son of a poet and brought up in poetic circles, who knew how to write elegant trivialities, or who was, as the French say, maitre en l'art de badiner avec elegance. Curiously enough, it was he who imported the sonnet from Italy. It had been hitherto unknown to French poets, but was unfortunately, as it must seem to most of us, destined to eclipse the ballades, rondeaux, virelais and other poetic forms that had been for so long in vogue in France. I prefer to quote here two of his shorter epigramatic poems which serve to show how old the new is in wit and humor:

"You find great fault with me, my friend. Because your neighbor I commend, And yet from you all praise withhold: {468} But say, why should I waste my time Praising your merits or your rhyme? You do it best a hundredfold."

The second treats in vivid satire the eternal question of the honor due the scholar:

"Friend! tell of these two things the just degree, Great learning or great wealth; the better which? I know not. But the learned still I see Paying great court and homage to the rich."

The "Defense et Illustration de la Langue Francaise," which is the manifesto of the Pleiades, was written by Joachim du Bellay just at the end of Columbus' Century and published in February, 1550, according to the modern calendar, but 1549 in the old, which made the year begin on Lady Day (March 25). With that a group of men, most of them about twenty-five years of age, entered upon a new period of French literature. A sham middle age had been lingering on,--the mere remnants and echo of the Romance of the Rose, and now a new spirit was to enter into French literature. The genius of it had all been cradled in Columbus' Century. The poets of the Pleiades came to teach the modern note. Pierre Ronsard was the greatest of them, and in five years all Europe knew something of the new birth in French poetry. Two such very different minds as those of Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth of England became ardent admirers and indeed almost patrons of the new poets, and particularly of Ronsard. Many of the poems had been conceived, and some of the best were issued within a year or two after the close of what we have called Columbus' Century. The little lyric "Mignonne! Allons voir si la Rose," which has always been a favorite in every generation with any poetry in its soul, was known throughout Europe within a year of its publication in 1552.

There is another ode of Ronsard's of much more serious vein which serves to show that the poets of the older time could think of other things besides love and beauty and the rose, and face the sterner problems of their time and sing the {469} meaning of them with poetic depth. Because its subject is quite as eternal in its interest as that of the love poems and has perhaps more significance for our time, I prefer to quote it:

"Why, poor peasant, should you dread Sceptered hand or crowned head? They shall soon--slight shades--be sent The number of the dead t' augment. To all mortals--dost not wis?-- Death's wide gate e'er open is. There th' imperial soul must wend, There as speedily descend, Charon's fatal boat to find, As the soul of serf or hind.

Courage you who delvers are; These great thunderbolts of war No more than yourselves shall go Armed with breastplate there below, As though battling as of yore. Mail shall profit them no more-- Lance and shield and battle blade-- Than shall you your scythe and spade.

Rhadamanthus, judge severe, Be you sure no more will fear Armor in his dread abode Than the peasant's wooden goad; Nor does more or less admire Richest robe or mean attire, Or the gorgeous pageantry Where the king in state doth lie."

Joachim du Bellay, snatched away at the early age of thirty-five after having passed many years in illness, owed his inspiration to write poetry to his reading of the classics. It was he who wrote the proclamation of the Pleiades which I have already mentioned. Had his fate been happier, doubtless there {470} would have been many great poems from him and he would have been a serious rival of his friend Ronsard. As it is, there are from his pen some poems that will always have an interest for the French and for the educated in every country. One of the more serious deserves to be quoted.

"If, then, our life is shorter than a day Lost in all time; if the revolving year Hurries our days past hope to reappear; If all things born must fail and pass away--

What, O my prisoned soul, dost dream of? say! Why so much love our days of darkness here. If to take flight to an abode more dear, Well-feathered wings you on your shoulders sway?

There is the good which ever soul desires. There the repose to which the world aspires, And there is love and pleasure evermore.

There, O my soul, rapt to the highest skies, You will in actual substance recognize Th' ideal beauty which I now adore."

In the French prose of our century there is Comines at the beginning, a not unworthy fourth in that wonderful quartette of French historical writers which began with Villehardouin at the end of the twelfth century, gave us Joinville in the thirteenth, Froissart in the fourteenth and Comines in the latter half of the fifteenth. He is one of the historians who will ever be read; with a political sagacity and philosophic outlook on history that give him a place of his own. He was no mere chronicler, and the individuality of his work, that quality by which history is raised into literature, sets him far above many a modern writer of what is called history, though it is merely a collection of materials for some historian who will inform them with a soul. At the end of the century there was Michel de L'Hopital, whose orations, numerous memoirs and special treatises mainly connected with explanations of {471} law have the defects of legal writing at all times, and yet exhibit a power of expression that has seldom been equalled at any time.

After Rabelais, undoubtedly the greatest of the prose writers of the time was Amyot, whose first work, a translation of a Greek romance, "Theagene et Charicle," was published in 1546, and who, in the subsequent years of a life that reached almost to ninety, published his translations of Plutarch, a work for which he received the designation of preceptor of the royal children and the Bishopric of Auxerre. He was the grand almoner.

Amyot's translation of Plutarch has been declared practically a new and original work. Montaigne said of it:

"I am grateful to Amyot above all things for having had the wit to select so worthy and so suitable a work to present his country. We ignorant folk had been lost, had not this lifted us out of the mire; thanks to it, we now dare speak and write, and ladies give lessons out of it to school-masters; 'tis our breviary." For English-speaking people its significance is greatly enhanced from the consideration that it was really Amyot's version which, in the English dress of Florio, became Shakespeare's Plutarch. Anyone who knows how closely Shakespeare followed his Plutarch will appreciate, then, what an important influence on world literature Amyot was destined to have.

This translation of Plutarch has come to be looked upon as probably one of the best translations ever made. It has sometimes been said that "to translate is to betray" and that the best translations are at most tapestries seen from the wrong side, but Amyot's "Plutarch" must be considered an exception to this rule. Erasmus said of Linacre's translation into Latin of Galen that it was better than the original Greek. Amyot's "Plutarch" has become a French classic, though the Greek author was by no means classic in the limited sense of the word in the original. Racine would read no other because he thought there was nothing to equal it in French. Amyot's works are a treasure house of the French language, and modern French critics often regret that many of his expressions have been allowed to sink into desuetude.

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France glories in the possession of another of these striking characters of the Renaissance period, Rabelais, about the estimation of whose character and place in history, just as with regard to Machiavelli, the world has not quite made up its mind. There is no doubt at all as to his genius, nor his breadth of view and comprehensive grasp of the knowledge of his time, nor of his ability as a vigorous writer, though his crudities of style and frequent indulgence in vulgarity, have made him a writer largely for men, and even many of these have been deterred from the study of his writings because of the glaringness of these faults. His defects were largely those of his time, for they were accustomed to call a spade a spade in the Renaissance. It was not because of looseness of his own life that his crudities of style are so manifest. Careful investigations and research in our time have made it very clear that there are many misunderstandings with regard to his personal character which should be removed. Rabelais ran the whole gamut of life in his time. He was first a friar, then a monk, took his medical degrees at Montpellier, a physician who gained considerable prestige for his knowledge of medicine, a writer of books that were widely read, a scholar whose journeys to Rome gave him a breadth of knowledge unusual even in his time, and the intimate friend of some of the great and good churchmen and literary men of his time.

The old legend which represented him as a gluttonous and wine-bibbing buffoon, wandering in revels as an unfrocked priest, must now be abandoned. His transitions from friar to monk, to physician, were all accomplished with due ecclesiastical permission, and in spite of the freedom of speech and liberalizing tendencies to be found in his writings he never got into serious trouble with the ecclesiastical authorities. Evidently he was looked upon as a genius whose good will might be depended on to keep him from serious heretical divagations, though occasionally his superabundant vital spirit would lead him into expressions that were often indiscreet and sometimes needed correction. His relations with Guillaume and Jean du Bellay and with the bishops of Maillezais and Montpellier, as well as the distinguished jurist, Tiraqueau, furnish most convincing proof of the high regard in which he was held not {473} only by men of his own rank, but by those far above him in power and station--Princes of the Church and patrons of humanism.

In spite of their deterring vulgarity, his works have been much read ever since and are still often in the hands of scholars and those who want to appreciate one phase at least of the true inwardness and all-comprehensiveness of the spirit of the Renaissance. The number of Greek and Latin writers from whom he quotes is very large, and his reading must have been very wide. He seems also to have known some Hebrew. Very few of his contemporaries realized at all that in his writings he had made an enduring contribution not only to French, but to world literature. So good a critic, however, as Joachim du Bellay in the "Defence and Illustration of the French Tongue" alludes to him as the man "who has brought back Aristophanes to life and who imitates so well the satirical wit of Lucian."

The fact that his book should be published at this time without its author incurring serious censure, much less persecution, is a proof that the usual persuasion of many who write on the history of this time that heresy-baiting was a favorite occupation of the Churchmen is unfounded and shows how absurd is the impression entertained by not a few that the slightest imprudence might have even fatal consequences. Men like Etienne Dolet and Giordano Bruno lost their lives at this time on heretical charges, but that was because their writings seemed to the Church, and above all the civil authorities of the time, to undermine authority and to propagate anarchy. This has always been a dangerous suspicion for a philosophic writer to fall under at any time, and is not without its serious dangers, social rather than legal, even in our time. In other matters, however, as the example of Rabelais shows, there was, if not a modern liberty, at least a large tolerance of expression, provided the thoughts were tempered by humor and the character of the writer known to be such that genuine ill-will or anarchic tendencies towards civil and ecclesiastical authorities were not the manifest purpose of the writings.

The interest of our own generation in Rabelais is best {474} illustrated by the foundation in 1902 of the Societe des Etudes Rabelaisiennes at Paris. The organ of the Society, the Revue des Etudes Rabelaisiennes, made its first appearance in January, 1903, and has already added much to our knowledge of Rabelais. It has now been thoroughly demonstrated that Gargantua was a popular and folk-lore character long before Rabelais' time, and that he assumed the character only in order to give popular vogue to his own ideas. In spite of the cruder side of his work he has so much to say that is valuable with regard to education, valuable even for our time, so much of correction of popular errors and emphatic restatement of the philosophy of life by which men may secure their happiness, not through selfishness, but love for their fellowmen, that whenever men think deeply for themselves and do not merely drift in the wake of other thinkers, Rabelais will always attract attention. It is always a good sign when Rabelais becomes popular in France, for men are usually thinking more deeply than before. Like Dante, he is a touchstone of sincerity and honesty of thought and purpose among his countrymen.

Rabelais is a most difficult man to sum up for those who are not French. Saintsbury in his "Earlier Renaissance" has perhaps furnished the best brief appreciation when he said:

"On the pure credit side his (Rabelais') assets are so great that one can only marvel at the undervaluation of them by any competent auditor. . . . You may say some things against him, and some of these some things truly. But three things will remain. He is (let the competent gainsay it if they dare) one of the greatest writers of the world; he is one of the great satirists of the world; and he is--as not all great writers and very few great satirists have been--one who sincerely and strenuously loved his fellowmen."

In the first paragraph of his "Francois Rabelais" [Footnote 45] (written for the French Men of Letters Series), Arthur Tilley, whose "Literature of the French Renaissance" had shown how competent he was to judge, has summed up the character and place of Rabelais. It is to Tilley that I owe most of the {475} details that are given here, and his paragraph will serve as a fitting conclusion.

[Footnote 45: Lippincott, Phila., 1907.]

"It is a characteristic of the very greatest writers that they sum up, with more or less completeness, the thought, the aspirations, and the temper of their age, and this not only for their own country, but for the whole civilized world. Of this select band is Rabelais. He is the embodiment not only of the early French Renaissance, but of the whole Renaissance in its earlier and fresher manifestations, in its devotion to humanism, in its restless and many-sided curiosity, in its robust enthusiasm, in its belief in the future of the human race."

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IV. SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE LITERATURE

The Spanish literature of the period contains some all-important material of great significance not only for Spanish literature itself, but also for the literature of the world. In the chapter on Women of the Renaissance, I have called attention to the interest of Queen Isabella in things literary, and while she did not produce any formal literary work, her letters have been pronounced by the Spanish Academy classic documents in the Spanish language. The most important contribution to Spanish literature during the century came also from a woman, though she doubtless had as little thought of making literature when she wrote as did the Queen. This was St. Teresa, to whose works serious writers on spiritual subjects in all countries and at all times, often in spite of differences of belief, have turned as classics of spirituality. Her literary work consists of the treatises which she wrote by order of her confessors on mystical subjects and then her many letters. It is these last, particularly, that have been widely read in the modern time and that are world classics in their order. Probably no one has been more misunderstood than St. Teresa. She has come to be considered by many, who, as a rule, know nothing at all of her at first hand, as one of the almost impossible saintly personages whose hours of concentration in prayer and fasting and other mortifications have driven them into states of mind bordering on the irrational, if not frankly hysterical. Indeed she is often considered to be the most striking type of these.

David Hannay, in his "The Later Renaissance" in Professor Saintsbury's series, Periods of European Literature (New York: Scribner's, 1898), who has read her works with care, says: "Her letters, which are not only the most attractive part of her writing, but even the most valuable, show her {477} not only as a great saint, but as a great lady with a very acute mind, a fine wit and an abounding good sense. Her own great character is stamped on every line. Nobody ever showed less of the merely emotional saintly character 'meandering about, capricious, melodious, weak, at the will of devout whim mainly.'"

To get the real charm of St. Teresa's writings, one must read her letters, and from those it is almost impossible to take such selections as might be included in the brief space allowed here. Fortunately they have come to us as she wrote them. Fray Luis de Leon was himself literary enough to save them from a worthy father-confessor, who would have "improved upon and polished her periods." The world came near losing the marvellous language of which Crashaw said, "Oh it is not Spanish, but it is Heaven she spoke."

Some idea of her simplicity and power of expression can be appreciated from the "Hymn to Christ Crucified," familiar to English readers in Dryden's version, which has been attributed also to St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Francis Xavier, but which seems more appropriately ascribed to the Seraphic Mother of Crashaw's burning words, "sweet incendiary," "undaunted daughter of desires" and "fair sister of the seraphin." The poem is, no matter who may have been its author, at least a striking example of the style of the time.

"O God, Thou art the object of my love, Not for the hopes of endless joys above. Nor for the fear of endless pain below Which those who love Thee not must undergo: For me, and such as me, Thou once didst bear The ignominious cross, the nails, the spear, A thorny crown transpierced Thy sacred brow. What bloody sweats from every member flow! For me, in torture Thou resign'st Thy breath, Nailed to the cross, and sav'st me by Thy death: Say, can these sufferings fail my heart to move? What but Thyself can now deserve my love? Such as then was and is Thy love to me. Such is, and shall be still, my love to Thee. {478} Thy love, O Jesus, may I ever sing, O God of love, kind Parent, dearest King."

The most original contribution of Spain to pure literature were the Tales of Chivalry, which became so popular at the end of the fifteenth century. "Amadis de Gaul" is claimed by the French, but the French original has been lost and the Spanish one is not only well known, but characteristically Spanish, partaking of the very temper of the people. The first known edition is early in the sixteenth century, and within fifty years Spain produced twelve editions of it. A whole series of books of similar kind followed it. Many of these were totally lacking in literary quality, but they achieved popularity. Our own first novelists were literary folk. They have been succeeded by hack writers, who watch the fashion of the moment and make ever so much more money and sell ever so many more copies than did the great novelists. Something like this happened in Spain. These tales of chivalry have sometimes been made a matter of reproach to the intelligence of the Spaniards of the time, but then what shall we say of our own much more widespread occupation with stories if possible more trivial and absurd?

We are not without tributes from distinguished men to the interest they found in some of these stories. The "Palmerin de Inglaterra" which Cervantes' priest "would have kept in such a casket as that which Alexander found among Darius' spoils intended to guard the works of Homer," attracted so much attention from Edmund Burke that he avowed in the House of Commons that he had spent much time over it. Dr. Johnson confessed to having spent the leisure hours of a summer upon "Felixmarte de Hircania." "Amadis de Gaul" classed by Cervantes' barber as "the best in that kind," is perhaps the only one of the tales of chivalry that a man need read. The usual assumption that it is a story of France, because of the word Gaul, is quite mistaken. Amadis is a British Knight, Gaul stands for Wales, Vindilisora is Windsor, while Bristol becomes Bristoya. The action occurs "not many years after the Passion of our Redeemer." There are marvellous adventures, something happens on every page, {479} combats with giants, magical spells of all kinds, miracles, hair-breadth escapes, last-moment rescues, till fidelity is rewarded and Amadis marries Oriana, daughter of the King of Britain, and they all live happy ever after.

After the Tales of Chivalry came the Novelas de Picaros, picaresque novels we have called these Tales of Roguery in English. The two modes of fiction represent the opposite extremes. The tales of chivalry were almost entirely imaginary. The picaresque novels were rather naturalistic studies from low life. The first of these was the "Celestina" but the one that was most influential is the "Lazarillo de Tormes," which curiously enough has been attributed, though on dubious evidence, to the famous Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and also to Fray Juan de Ortega of the Order of St. Jerome. The stories represent the ever-recurring tendency of mankind to be interested in a rogue, to be ready to laugh at his rascalities and especially his capacity for cheating his betters that has been used so effectively by Plautus and was the germ of the idea in the plot of Gil Bias and Scarron and probably suggested Shakespeare's "Jack Falstaff." There are phases of our modern fiction that display the same tendency.

Fitzmaurice Kelly in his "Spanish Literature" (Appleton's Literatures of the World Series, New York, 1898) said of the "Lazarillo de Tormes":

"After three hundred years, it survives all its rivals, and may be read with as much edification and amusement as on the day of its first appearance. It set a fashion, a fashion that spread to all countries, and finds a nineteenth century manifestation in the pages of 'Pickwick'; but few of its successors match it in satirical humor, and none approach it in pregnant concision, where no word is superfluous, and where every word tells with consummate effect. Whoever wrote the book, he fixed forever the type of the comic prose epic as rendered by the needy, and he did it in such wise as to defy all competition."

By a very curious contrast, the literature of Spanish origin from this century which has most influenced the world, being translated into all the languages and read and studied deeply, is exactly the opposite pole of these prose epics. For the {480} world's best-known writers on spirituality and mysticism have been Spaniards, the greatest of them lived at this time and they are still being read everywhere, edition after edition appearing in many languages. The great names among the mystics whose writings were either completed during our century, or at least the foundation for whose work was laid because their authors came to their maturity during this time, were John of Avila, Luis de Granada and Luis de Leon. John of Avila is the best known of these and occupied something of the position of master to the others. His most famous book, "The Spiritual Treatise," is still widely read in religious institutions and is familiar to all those who have made any serious study of the religious life. As there are and have been ever since his time hundreds of thousands of religious in the world, many of them representing the highest culture and good taste, "the apostle of Andalusia," as he was called, has had a large circle of chosen readers for all these centuries. His book is written with an ardent eloquence in the deeply spiritual passages, and as Hannay has said, "has always a large share of the religious quality of unction." There are many profoundly intelligent and seriously thoughtful men of our time who consider it one of the most wonderful books ever written.

Luis de Granada's book, "The Guide for Sinners," was translated into all the languages of Europe and read not only by the clergy, but by the people. His book of "Prayer and Meditation on the Principal Mysteries of Faith" was much more in the hands of the clergy and religious, but was scarcely less famous. Luis de Leon's "Perfecta Casada" gained a wide reputation, and his other books on "The Names of Christ" and "The Book of Job" had a place in every important religious community in Europe.

Two names in the Spanish poetry of this period are immortal in Spain, and their writings are familiar to the students of literature the world over. They are Boscan and Garcilaso de la Vega. The younger man, Garcilaso, sent Castiglione's "Il Cortigiano" to Boscan and suggested its translation into Spanish. Fitzmaurice Kelly, in his "Spanish Literature," has said, "Though Boscan himself held translation to be a thing {481} meet for 'men of small parts,' his rendering is an almost perfect performance." This led Boscan to put into Spanish form many other Italian pieces, not so much by translation as by imitation more suited to the genius of the Spanish language. Not a great genius, not a lordly versifier, endowed with not one supreme gift, Boscan ranks as an unique instance in the annals of literature by virtue of his enduring and irrevocable victory.

Garcilaso, his young friend, is far ahead of him in poetic genius. He was a soldier-poet, "taking now the sword and now the pen," as he said himself, and he died at the early age of thirty-three. His death occurred as the leader of a storming party in romantic circumstances, under the eye of the Emperor and the army. The first to climb the breach, he fell mortally wounded into the arms of the future translator of Ariosto and of his more intimate friend, the Marques de Lombay, whom the world knows best as St. Francis Borgia. "His illustrious descent, his ostentatious valor, his splendid presence, his seductive charm, his untimely death: all these, joined to his gift of song, combined to make him the hero of legend and the idol of a nation. Like Sir Philip Sidney, Garcilaso personified all accomplishments and all graces." Curiously enough it is not the martial but the pastoral that Garcilaso sings and "the light that never was on land or sea," of peace with poetic melancholy, that may so easily be the subject of criticism, yet has always been the favorite retreat of a great many poets at many recurring times.

At the Western end of the Spanish Peninsula the Portuguese, distinct in language, had a literature of their own which reached its perfection just after Columbus' Century, but the promise of which can be seen during our period. The greatest of their poets is Camoeens, whom the German critic Schlegel did not hesitate to place above not only his two great contemporaries of the sixteenth century, Ariosto and Tasso, but above all the modern epic poets and even above Virgil. His poem has been read in translation in all the languages of Europe. While it was not written in what we have called Columbus' Century, the poet had given evidence of the greatness of his genius before 1550, and some of the sonnets of his {482} early years have deservedly been looked upon as worthy perhaps of a place among the greatest examples in that form. Mrs. Browning's reason for calling her "Sonnets from the Portuguese" by that name was that probably the most beautiful love sonnets in the world had been written in that language. The Portuguese language was given the form in which it was to survive at this time, and it is always when a language is being formed that somehow geniuses come to round out its powers of expression and at the same time give it the form which it is to maintain partly as a consequence of their genius having expressed itself in it in certain enduring modes.

Some of the shorter poems written by Camoeens when he was a young man between twenty and twenty-five, that is, before the close of Columbus' Century, are so characteristic of the vers de societe at all times, and yet are such delightful bits of versification with here and there a touch of charming poetic quality, that they have more than passing interest for the modern time. I venture to quote several of them to illustrate their variety, but at the same time because, though all are attributed to Camoeens, it is doubtful whether some of them were not written by others and afterwards transferred to him because of his greater fame. They illustrate very well the poetic vein of the Portuguese of the time, though ordinarily it is not assumed that Portugal was touched by the spirit of the Renaissance to any great degree or that her literature is of any significance. Most of them are with regard to love, though not all of them are as serious as the rondeau so often quoted:

"Just like Love is yonder rose, Heavenly fragrance round it throws. Yet tears its dewy leaves disclose, And in the midst of briars it blows, Just like Love.

Cull'd to bloom upon the breast. Since rough thorns the stem invest. They must be gather'd with the rest. And with it, to the heart be press'd. Just like Love. {483} And when rude hands the twin-buds sever They die--and they shall blossom never, --Yet the thorns be sharp as ever, Just like Love."

In lighter vein is the canzonet to the lady who swore by her eyes, a custom which was rather common according to the tales of chivalry so popular shortly before this time. The first and last stanza will give a good idea of it:

"When the girl of my heart is on perjury bent, The sweetest of oaths hides the falsest intent. And Suspicion, abash'd, from her company flies, When she smiles like an angel--and swears by her eyes.

Then, dear one, I'd rather, thrice rather believe Whate'er you assert, even though to deceive. Than that you 'by your eyes' should so wickedly swear, And sin against heaven--for heaven is there!"

At times the Portuguese poet could be rather serious. The two stanzas from the beginning of a canzonet, which contrasts the making of money with the doing of good as the proper aim of life, has often been quoted:

"Since in this dreary vale of tears No certainty but death appears. Why should we waste our vernal years In hoarding useless treasure?

No--let the young and ardent mind Become the friend of humankind, And in the generous service find A source of purer pleasure!"

The poet is said to have fallen in love with a maid of honor at the court far above him in rank. For this impudence, he was banished from court, and unable to live so near, yet so far, resolved to go as a soldier to Africa. Somehow or other a {484} last meeting with her (she died at the early age of twenty) was managed before his departure, and he discovered in her eyes, as she bade him good-bye, the secret that she was as deeply in love as he. He went where duty called, fought bravely, losing the sight of an eye in one of the battles, and, loaded with martial honor, was permitted to return to court. When he returned, his inamorata was no more. The sonnet written when he learned the sad news is more artificial perhaps than he would have written in his maturity, but it and others gave Portuguese literature the fame for love sonnets which suggested to Mrs. Browning the title "Sonnets from the Portuguese" for her love poems:

"Those charming eyes, within whose starry sphere Love whilom sat, and smil'd the hours away. Those braids of light that sham'd the beams of day. That hand benignant, and that heart sincere; Those virgin cheeks, which did so late appear Like snow-banks scatter'd with the blooms of May, Turn'd to a little cold and worthless clay. Are gone--forever gone--and perish here, --But not unbath'd by Memory's warmest tear! --Death! thou hast torn, in one unpitying hour. That fragrant plant, to which, while scarce a flow'r. The mellower fruitage of its prime was given; Love saw the deed--and as he lingered near, Sigh'd o'er the ruin, and return'd to Heav'n!"

The literature of the Spanish peninsula was to have its flourishing period in the century following that we have called after Columbus, but there is enough of enduring literary products to show that men's minds were deeply affected by the great spirit of the time and to lay broad and deep foundations for the Golden Age of Spanish literature that was to follow so soon.

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