Then came the sixteenth century, with its artistic developments, its national rivalries, its far-away discoveries, its theological debates, and its social and religious unrest. The common people, especially the commercial middle class, clamored to understand: and the result was the appearance of national literatures on a large scale. Alongside of Latin, which was henceforth restricted to the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church and to particularly learned treatises, there now emerged truly literary works in Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, English, etc. The printing of these works at once stereotyped their respective languages, so that since the sixteenth century the written forms of the vernacular tongues have been subject to relatively minor change. Speaking generally, the sixteenth century witnessed the fixing of our best known modern languages. To review all the leading writers who employed the various vernaculars in the sixteenth century would encroach too much upon the province of professed histories of comparative literature, but a few references to certain figures that tower head and shoulders above all others in their respective countries may serve to call vividly to mind the importance of the period for national literatures. [Sidenote: Italian Literature] At the very outset, one important exception must be made in favor of Italy, whose poetry and prose had already been immortalized by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio a hundred years and more before the opening of the sixteenth century. But that country, as we have already repeatedly observed in many kinds of art, anticipated all others in modern times. Italy, almost the last European land to be politically unified, was the first to develop a great national literature. But Italian literature was broadened and popularized by several influential writers in the sixteenth century, among whom stand preeminent the Florentine diplomat Machiavelli (1469-1527), whose _Prince_ really founded the modern science of politics, and who taught the dangerous doctrine that a ruler, bent on exercising a benevolent despotism, is justified in employing any means to achieve his purpose; Ariosto (1474-1533), whose great poem _Orlando Furioso_ displayed a powerful imagination no less than a rare and cultivated taste; and the unhappy mad Tasso (1544-1595), who in _Jerusalem Delivered_ produced a bulky epic poem, adapting the manner of Virgil to a crusading subject, and in Aminta gave to his countrymen a delightful pastoral drama, the exquisite lyrics of which were long sung in opera. [Sidenote: French literature]