the Italians to fit into their pictures landscapes seen through doors or windows, gleaming in sunshine, green and bright.  Van Eyck’s ’Adoration of the Lamb’ is set in beautiful scenery; grassy slopes and banks studded with flowers, soft swelling hills, and blue distances crowned with the towers he knew so well, Utrecht and Maestricht and Cologne and Bruges.  Even in the interiors of Durer and Holbein, where no window opens to let in the view, Nature is not left wholly unrepresented; for flowers often stand upon the tables, carnations and lilies and roses, arranged with taste and elegance.  On the whole the enjoyment of Nature formed but a small part in the outlook of that age as compared with the prominence it receives in modern literature and life; but we should be wrong in inferring that it was wholly absent.

To the men of the fifteenth century the earth was still the centre of the universe:  the sun moved round it like a more magnificent planet, and the stars had been created

                                        ’to shed down
      Their stellar influence on all kinds that grow’.

Aristarchus had seen the truth, though he could not establish it, in the third century B.C.  But Greek science had been forgotten in an age which knew no Greek; and it was not till after Erasmus’ death that an obscure canon in a small Prussian town near Danzig—­Nicholas Copernicus, 1473-1543—­found out anew the secret of the world.  This fruit of long cold watches on the tower of his church he printed with full demonstration, but he scarcely dared to publish the book:  indeed a perfect copy only reached him a few days before his death.  Even in the next century Galileo had to face imprisonment and threats of torture, because he would speak that which he knew.  But when Erasmus was born, the earth itself was but partially revealed.  Men knew not even whether it were round or flat; and the unplumbed sea could still estrange.  The voyages of the Vikings had passed out of mind, and the eyes of Columbus and Vespucci had not yet seen the limits of that western ocean which so long fascinated their gaze.  Polo had roamed far into the East; but as yet Diaz and da Gama had not crowned the hopes which so often drew Henry the Navigator to his Portuguese headland.

In the world of thought the conception of uniformity in Nature, though formed and to some extent accepted among the advanced, was still quite outside the ordinary mind.  Miracles were an indispensable adjunct to the equipment of every saint; and might even be wrought by mere men, with the aid of the black arts.  The Devil was an ever-present personality, going about to entrap and destroy the unwary.  Clear-minded Luther held converse with him in his cell; and lesser demons were seen or suspected on every side.  Thus in 1523 the Earl of Surrey writes to Wolsey describing a night attack on Jedburgh in a Border foray.  The horses took fright, and their sudden panic threw