Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/205

 were covered, after the manner of popular art, with materials of variegated colours, including discs of ceramic at the point of intersection of the arches and under the eaves, and with religious paintings. The gracious shape was crowned by a small turret, the belfry being set in the surrounding walls, which were as thick as those of a fortress.

Literature kept its popular character. Monks and nobles worked on the unchanging foundation of the ancient peasant tradition. A style common to all provinces was created as early as the 16th century, the Gospel being translated under the influence of the spreading hussitism in the early years of the fifteenth. The old rhythm of the popular ballads and lyrics of love, desire and sorrow continued to set the tone for all poetical work. Byzantium contributed only literature dealing with the Orthodox religion, a type for chronicles, works of rhetoric and world histories and, incidentally, the old Indian tales adopted into Greek literature. In the 16th century the renaissance came less from decaying Transylvania than from Poland. In the middle of this period came a complete translation of the difficult Herodotus, while the Moldavian Metropolitan Dositheus issued a Psalter in folk ballad form, in rhymed verse. Literary individualism began to manifest itself, the propensity to write personal memoirs in a desultory and capricious form, as shown by Miron Costin, a pupil of the Polish school. His son Nicholas, another historian and champion of the Latin origins of the nation, was a scholar in the sense of the Western Latinists. In Prince Demetrius Cantemir, who was forced to take refuge in Russia after the catastrophe of his great ally the Czar Peter, unexpectedly defeated by the Turks in 1711, the Roumanian race had an universal genius, able to treat in different languages