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RENAISSANCE

HE close of the sixteenth century saw western Europe undergoing a curious and comfortable change. Civilization, with her handmaid, luxury, and her schoolmaster, the printing-press, had seduced the souls of men. War was no longer a pastime for princes; it was a serious and expensive business, frowned upon by financiers, and deferred as tediously as possible. Men built themselves costly homes, bought pictures and tapestries and vellum-bound books, and began slowly