By the side of these local temples of fame, which myth, legend, popular admiration, and literary tradition combined to create, the poet-scholars built up a great Pantheon of worldwide celebrity. They made collections of famous men and famous women, often in direct imitation of Cornelius Nepos, the pseudo-Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, Plutarch (_Mulierum_ _virtutes_), Hieronymus (_De Viris Illustribus_), and others: or they wrote of imaginary triumphal processions and Olympian assemblies, as was done by Petrarch in his ‘Trionfo della Fama,’ and Boccaccio in the ‘Amorosa Visione,’ with hundreds of names, of which three-fourths at least belong to antiquity and the rest to the Middle Ages.[344] By-and-by this new and comparatively modern element was treated with greater emphasis; the historians began to insert descriptions of character, and collections arose of the biographies of distinguished contemporaries, like those of Filippo Villani, Vespasiano Fiorentino, Bartolommeo Facio, Paolo Cortese,[345] and lastly of Paolo Giovio.[346] The North of Europe, until Italian influence began to tell upon its writers--for instance, on Trithemius, the first German who wrote the lives of famous men--possessed only either legends of the saints, or descriptions of princes and churchmen partaking largely of the character of legends and showing no traces of the idea of fame, that is, of distinction won by a man’s personal efforts. Poetical glory was still confined to certain classes of society, and the names of northern artists are only known to us at this period in so far as they were members of certain guilds or corporations.