Nothing is more natural than that the new form of historiography should seem to be a return to Græco-Roman antiquity, as Christianity had seemed to be a return to the story of Eden (the interlude of paganism having been brought to an end by the redemption), or that the Middle Ages should still seem to some to-day to be a falling back into barbarous pre-Hellenic times. The illusion of the return was expressed in the cult of classical antiquity, and in all those manifestations, literary, artistic, moral, and customary, familiar to those who know the Renaissance. In the special field with which we are at present occupied, we find a curious document in support of the difficulty that philologists and critics experienced in persuading themselves that the Greek and Roman writers had perhaps been able to deceive themselves, to lie, to falsify, to be led astray by passions and blinded by ignorance, in the same way as those of the Middle Ages. Thus the latter were severely criticized while the former were reverenced and accepted, for it needed much time and labour to attain to an equal mental freedom regarding the ancients, and the criticism of texts and of sources was developed in respect to medieval history long before it attained to a like freedom in respect to ancient history. But the greatest proof and monument of the illusion of the return was the formation of the _humanistic_ type of historiography, opposed to the medieval. This had been chiefly confined to the form of chronicle and humanistic historiography, although it accepted the arrangement by years and seasons according to the examples set by the Greeks and Romans, cancelled as far as possible numerical indications, and exerted itself to run on unbrokenly, without chronological cuts and cross-cuts. Latin had become barbarous in the Middle Ages and had accepted the vocabularies of vulgar tongues, or those which designated new things in a new way, whereas the humanistic historiographers translated and disguised every thought and every narrative in Ciceronian Latin, or at least Latin of the Golden Age. We frequently find picturesque anecdotes in the medieval chronicles, and humanism, while it restored its dignity to history, deprived it of that picturesque element, or attenuated and polished it as it had done the things and customs of the barbaric centuries. This humanistic type of historiography, like the new philological erudition and criticism and the whole movement of the Renaissance, was Italian work, and in Italy histories in the vulgar tongue were soon modelled upon it, which found in the latinized prose of Boccaccio an instrument well suited to their ends. From Italy it was diffused among other countries, and as always happens when an industry is transplanted into virgin soil, and workmen and technical experts are invited to come from the country of its origin, so the first humanistic historians of the other parts of Europe were Italians. Paolo Emilio the Veronese, who _Gallis condidit historias,_ gave the French the humanistic history of France in his _De rebus gestis Francorum,_ and Polydore Virgil did the like for England, Lucio Marineo for Spain, and many others for other countries, until indigenous experts appeared and the aid of Italians became unnecessary. Later on it became necessary to throw off this cloak, which was too loose or too tight--indeed, was not cut to the model of modern thought. What there was in it of artificial, of swollen, of false, was blamed--these defects being indeed clearly indicated in the constructive principle of this literary form, which was that of imitation. But anyone with a feeling for the past will enjoy that historical humanistic prose as the expression of love for antiquity and of the desire to rise to its level. This love and this desire were so keen that they had no hesitation in reproducing things external and indifferent in addition to what was better and sometimes in default of it.