On the Continent, also, this new interest in the classics served to check the growth of native literatures.  In Italy especially, for a full century after the brilliant age of Dante and Petrarch, no great literature was produced, and the Italian language itself seemed to go backward.[107] The truth is that these great writers were, like Chaucer, far in advance of their age, and that the mediaeval mind was too narrow, too scantily furnished with ideas to produce a varied literature.  The fifteenth century was an age of preparation, of learning the beginnings of science, and of getting acquainted with the great ideals,—­the stern law, the profound philosophy, the suggestive mythology, and the noble poetry of the Greeks and Romans.  So the mind was furnished with ideas for a new literature.

With the exception of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (which is still mediaeval in spirit) the student will find little of interest in the literature of this period.  We give here a brief summary of the men and the books most “worthy of remembrance”; but for the real literature of the Renaissance one must go forward a century and a half to the age of Elizabeth.

The two greatest books which appeared in England during this period are undoubtedly Erasmus’s[108] Praise of Folly (Encomium Moriae) and More’s Utopia, the famous “Kingdom of Nowhere.”  Both were written in Latin, but were speedily translated into all European languages.  The Praise of Folly is like a song of victory for the New Learning, which had driven away vice, ignorance, and superstition, the three foes of humanity.  It was published in 1511 after the accession of Henry VIII.  Folly is represented as donning cap and bells and mounting a pulpit, where the vice and cruelty of kings, the selfishness and ignorance of the clergy, and the foolish standards of education are satirized without mercy.

More’s Utopia, published in 1516, is a powerful and original study of social conditions, unlike anything which had ever appeared in any literature.[109] In our own day we have seen its influence in Bellamy’s Looking Backward, an enormously successful book, which recently set people to thinking of the unnecessary cruelty of modern social conditions.  More learns from a sailor, one of Amerigo Vespucci’s companions, of a wonderful Kingdom of Nowhere, in which all questions of labor, government, society, and religion have been easily settled by simple justice and common sense.  In this Utopia we find for the first time, as the foundations of civilized society, the three great words, Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, which retained their inspiration through all the violence of the French Revolution and which are still the unrealized ideal of every free government.  As he hears of this wonderful country More wonders why, after fifteen centuries of Christianity, his own land is so little civilized; and as we read the book to-day we ask ourselves the same question.  The splendid dream is still far from being realized; yet it seems as if any nation could become Utopia in a single generation, so simple and just are the requirements.