Political and religious causes, due to the grip of the Spanish rule, had retarded the progress of the Flemish provinces, while, on the other hand, it was the break away from this absolutism that started the northern provinces of Holland on their Renaissance. The Holland Renaissance of the seventeenth century, which moved step by step with their struggle for political and religious liberty and their consolidation into a united nation, represented a most remarkable blend of Humanism and Revival of Learning. It was unique at its time and has preserved its significance, because both these engines of activity were devoted deliberately to national and individual betterment. The Dutch zest of life stimulated them not only to obtain their liberty, but also to improve in a multitude of practical ways the conditions of living. It caused them to organise industry and commerce, to cultivate their land intensively and to extend their explorations and trade over the seven seas. Nor were the intellectual resources overlooked. The university of Leyden became a great centre of human culture and its scholars and scientists set the course of thought and research in the direction of modern life. Holland’s prosperity, however, proved her undoing. After defying and withstanding the absolutism of Spain, she fell a victim to that of Louis XIV. And less by direct conquest than by the insidious sapping of French influences. She became inflated with the ambition of being a world-power, while her citizens emulated the fashions of French society. Losing at the same time political liberty and intellectual and artistic initiative and independence, she followed the human sheep-trail that led southward over the Alps and for more than a century became a clumsy imitator of the past art of Italy. ENGLISH RENAISSANCE England’s insular position tended to delay her reception of the New Spirit. When at length it reached her it came simultaneously in the form of Italian influence and of the Reformation. Yet both had been anticipated a century earlier; the Reformation in the teaching of Wycliffe, the Renaissance in the poetry of Chaucer. But the harvest of the new spirit had been deferred by the French wars, the Wars of the Roses, and the persecution of the Lollards, so that it was not until 1536, when the King, Lords, and Commons by the Act of Supremacy established the Reformed Faith as the State Religion, that England entered definitely, says Symonds, on a career of intellectual activity abreast with the foremost nations of the Continent.