ll devoted their efforts to the
illustration of the period of which we have before spoken,--the grand
and fruitful sixteenth century. With the men and with the events of that
age we have thus become singularly familiar. We have been made
acquainted, not only with the deeds, but with the thoughts, of Charles
V., Philip II., Elizabeth Tudor, Cortes, Alva, Farnese, William the
Silent, and a host of other actors in some of the most striking scenes
of history. But we have also been tempted into forgetting that those
were not isolated scenes, that they belonged to a drama which had long
been in progress, and that the very energy they displayed, the power put
forth, the conquests won, were indicative of previous struggles and a
long accumulation of resources. Of what are called the Middle Ages the
general notion might, perhaps, be comprised in the statement that they
were ages of barbarism and ignorance, of picturesque customs and aimless
adventure. "I desire to know nothing of those who knew nothing," was the
saying, in reference to them, of the French _philosophe_. "Classical
antiquity is nearer to us than the intervening darkness," said Hazlitt.
And Hume and Robertson both consider that the interest of European
history begins with the revival of letters, the invention of printing,
the colonization of America, and the great contests between consolidated
monarchies and between antagonistic principles and creeds.

It must be admitted that the greater portion of mediaeval history,
whatever its true character, is shrouded in an obscurity which it would
be difficult, if not impossible, to penetrate. But the same cannot be
said of the close of that period,--the transitional era that preceded
what we are accustomed to consider as the dawn of modern civilization.
For Continental Europe, at least, the fifteenth century is hardly less
susceptible of a thorough revelation than the sixteenth. The chroniclers
and memoir-writers are more communicative than those of the succeeding
age. The documentary evidence, if still deficient, is rapidly
accumulating. The conspicuous personages of the time are daily becoming
more palpable and familiar to us. Joan of Arc has glided from the
luminous haze of legend and romance into the clearer light of history.
Philippe de Comines has a higher fame than any eye-witness and narrator
of later events. Louis XI. discloses to posterity those features which
he would fain have concealed from his contemporaries.