Author Description

Excerpt from With Illustrative Texts From Masterpiece of Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Modern European and American Literature Fully Illustrated, Vol. 6 However convenient it may be to divide the progress of the world into accurately dated periods, every student knows that history is not made up of a series of a abrupt changes, but of long processes of gradual development. Each period of history, while deriving its character from the ages that have preceded, lays the foundations of the ages that are to follow. Thus it is impossible to fix an exact date when the Middle Ages began after the fall of ancient civilization or ended with the dawn of the Renaissance. The supremacy of the Greeks was gradually superseded by that of the Romans; and they in turn were overwhelmed by Germanic invasions from the north, and by influences from the Orient. Europe became Christianized; the men of the Middle Ages were very different from their classical ancestors. Then in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the period which we call Renaissance, "rebirth," a renewed and more intelligent interest in antiquity begins, which leads by gradual steps to the civilization of the twentieth century. It is a fascinating study to compare the culture of the past with that of our own day; to realize the point of view of men in other ages; and to see how most of our modern ideas on all subjects - political, social, ethical, literary, artistic - are inherited by a slow process of development from remote antiquity. For centuries after the beginning of the Renaissance, the literature, the art, and the social usages of the preceding period were regarded as barbarous. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the o