In the long reign of Henry VIII the changes are less violent, but have more purpose and significance.  His age is marked by a steady increase in the national power at home and abroad, by the entrance of the Reformation “by a side door,” and by the final separation of England from all ecclesiastical bondage in Parliament’s famous Act of Supremacy.  In previous reigns chivalry and the old feudal system had practically been banished; now monasticism, the third mediaeval institution with its mixed evil and good, received its death-blow in the wholesale suppression of the monasteries and the removal of abbots from the House of Lords.  Notwithstanding the evil character of the king and the hypocrisy of proclaiming such a creature the head of any church or the defender of any faith, we acquiesce silently in Stubb’s declaration[105] that “the world owes some of its greatest debts to men from whose memory the world recoils.”

While England during this period was in constant political strife, yet rising slowly, like the spiral flight of an eagle, to heights of national greatness, intellectually it moved forward with bewildering rapidity.  Printing was brought to England by Caxton (c. 1476), and for the first time in history it was possible for a book or an idea to reach the whole nation.  Schools and universities were established in place of the old monasteries; Greek ideas and Greek culture came to England in the Renaissance, and man’s spiritual freedom was proclaimed in the Reformation.  The great names of the period are numerous and significant, but literature is strangely silent.  Probably the very turmoil of the age prevented any literary development, for literature is one of the arts of peace; it requires quiet and meditation rather than activity, and the stirring life of the Renaissance had first to be lived before it could express itself in the new literature of the Elizabethan period.

THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING.  The Revival of Learning denotes, in its broadest sense, that gradual enlightenment of the human mind after the darkness of the Middle Ages.  The names Renaissance and Humanism, which are often applied to the same movement, have properly a narrower significance.  The term Renaissance, though used by many writers “to denote the whole transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world,"[106] is more correctly applied to the revival of art resulting from the discovery and imitation of classic models in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.  Humanism applies to the revival of classic literature, and was so called by its leaders, following the example of Petrarch, because they held that the study of the classics, literae humaniores,—­i.e. the “more human writings,” rather than the old theology,—­was the best means of promoting the largest human interests.  We use the term Revival of Learning to cover the whole movement, whose essence was, according to Lamartine, that “man discovered himself and the universe,” and, according to Taine, that man, so long blinded, “had suddenly opened his eyes and seen.”