The Italian influence, therefore, did but hasten a process already at work. The reasons for this universal movement are very difficult to determine. But among many suggestions of more or less value, a few causes of the change may here be hazarded. In the first place, then, the Renaissance happened to be contemporaneous with the death of feudalism. The ideal of chivalry is dying out all over Europe; and the romances of chivalry are everywhere despised. The horizontal class divisions become obscured by the newly found perpendicular divisions of nationality; and in Italy and England at least the old feudal nobility have almost entirely disappeared. A new centre of national life and culture is therefore in the process of formation, that of the Court; and thanks to this, the ideal of chivalry gives place to the new ideal of the courtier or the gentleman. This ideal found literary expression in the moral Court treatises, which were so universally popular during the Renaissance, and of which Guevara, Castiglione, and Lyly are the most famous instances. The ambition of those who frequent Courts has always been to appear distinguished--distinguished that is from the vulgar and the ordinary, or, as we should now say, from the Philistine. In the Courts of the Renaissance period, where learning was considered so admirable, this necessary distinction would naturally take the form of a cultured, if not pedantic, diction; and for this it was natural that men should go to the classics, and more especially to classical orators, as models of good speech. It must not be imagined that this process was a conscious one. In many countries the rhetorical style was already formed by scholars before it became the speech of the Court. In fact the beginnings of modern prose style are to be found in humanism. Ascham with his hatred of the "Italianated gentleman," was probably quite unconscious of his own affinity to that objectionable type, when imitating the style of his favourite Tully in the _Schoolmaster_. The classics it must be remembered were not discovered by the humanists, they were only rediscovered. The middle ages had used them, as they had used the Old Testament, as prophetic books. Virgil's mediaeval reputation for example rests for the most part upon the fourth Eclogue. The humanists, on the other hand, looked upon the classics as literature and valued them for their style. But here again they drank from tainted sources; for, with the exception of a few writers such as Cicero and Terence, the classics they knew and loved best were the product of the silver age of Rome, the characteristics of which are beautifully described by the author of _Marius the Epicurean_ in his chapter significantly called _Euphuism_. Few of the Renaissance students had the critical acumen of Cheke, and they fell therefore an easy prey to the stylism of the later Latin writers, with its antithesis and extravagance. But, with all this, men could not quite shake off the middle ages.