The seed sown by these artists of the fourteenth century led to a rich crop of writers in the fifteenth and sixteenth and seventeenth; and we must remember that there was at the same time a splendid development of painting and a general enrichment of life, as well as a new liberality of thought and feeling. Italy in particular had a crowd of writers as well as great painters: writers on philosophy, writers on art (like Vasari), writers on history (notably Guicciardini) and story-tellers, poets, comedians, etc. To this period belongs the famous work of the diplomatist Macchiavelli (1469-1527), _The Prince_, giving such unscrupulous counsels to princes--a real reflection of the spirit of the times--that we have ever since called such maxims “Macchiavellian.” Another classic of the time is the _Autobiography_ of the sculptor and goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini (1500-71): a most interesting and candid account of adventurous life in that gay age. The chief Italian classics of the time are, however, the works of the greatest Italian poets after Dante, Ariosto (1474-1533) and Tasso. Both lived at the brilliant court of the Dukes of Ferrara who patronized them, but they differ entirely in character. Ariosto wrote comedies and satires and epic verse. He is chiefly known for his _Orlando Furioso_, a poem of great length on the war against the Saracens: which, by the way, no one reads today. Tasso had a more sober and melancholic character. His writings fill forty volumes, but few now read even his masterpiece, _Jerusalem Delivered_: an epic of the Crusades, an attempt to adapt the Greek epic to a profoundly religious theme. This inspired Milton’s _Paradise Lost_. The above dates will show that these writers end at the time of the change occasioned by the Reformation, and from that time there was no great literature in Italy until the nineteenth century. The works of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), Galileo (1564-1642), etc., belong rather to philosophy and science. Meantime the Renaissance or Re-Birth of Letters, had spread over Europe. Erasmus (1467-1536), a very liberal theologian and humanist of Holland, wrote brilliant and witty critical works on religion with an immense circulation, of which the most readable are his _Praise of Folly_ and his _Colloquies_ (or “Conversations,” his masterpiece). In France there was in the fifteenth century an adventurous poet, Francois Villon (born 1431), who has become very popular amongst literary men in our time. He was a thief, vagabond, even a murderer, and was often in prison. But he wrote beautiful ballads and rondels expressing the strange melancholy which his defiant life gave him. Swinburne calls him the “prince of sweet songs made out of tears and fire.”