ABSTRACT
IF the manners of an age are reflected in the character of its literature, the literature also affects and moulds the manners of the time. To take one instance out of many; the Renaissance period, taking a starting point from Petrarch, is expressed in its double tendency to reproduce the forms of classical literature and art, and to emancipate itself from medireval tradition, by the imitation of classical poetry, rhetoric and history, on the one hand, and on the other in a new birth of speculation, and a dramatic and romantic literature classical in form, but modern in subject and sentiment: and this literature in its turn helped to direct philosophical and historical speculation 10 a modern direction; whilst the free handling of social subjects, on the stage and in books intended to be read by all classes of society, democratized literature and set a common standard of social and moral conduct.
