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 THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 595 come very slowly. And just as there were good — some say, better — letter- writers in the days before cheap postage and typewriters, so there were great authors who wasted neither precious words nor paper in the period before the invention of printing. When both readers and writers had to go to a great deal of trouble, there naturally was much less written and read, but both reading and writing were probably done more thoroughly on the average. Some tendencies toward humanism are noticeable in France and England during the late fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, but they were sporadic. „ The Renaissance began first to be really felt in in other England in the reign of Henry VII and in France in that of Charles VIII, who both ruled at the very close of the fifteenth century. German humanism started a little earlier and ran its course with more vehemence. The move- ment in Germany was practically crowded into the last quarter of the fifteenth and the first quarter of the sixteenth centuries, and then soon faded into the religious reformation. V
 * r Humanism