Surely the most pleasant of an author's duties is to thank those who through their knowledge and generosity have lightened his labors. The dedication of this book signalizes, if inadequately, my sense of obligation to a man who as both friend and teacher has put me lastingly in his debt. Henry Nash Smith permitted himself to become involved in the very conception of this work, and I have probably profited more than I myself realize from his fine sense of history and his generous interest. Theodore Spencer and Douglas Bush took the trouble not only to read a bulky manuscript but through their detailed suggestions to give it virtues it would otherwise have lacked. D. T. Starnes was good enough to give the third section the benefit of his close knowledge of Renaissance literature. The Syndics of the Harvard University Press and Mr. Roger Scaife, the ldirectbi', have undertaken to publish without subsidy a book from which, in the nature of things, they can'expect no great return; and their agents, particularly Mrs. Cedric Whitman, have been unfailingly coiiperative. A grant from the Research Council of the University of Texas afforded me a Couple of months of blissful leisure for composition. Finally, I shall defy convention by thanking my wife for something other than her typing, ex cellent as it is. Although her services in behalf of this book will be name less, it must be said that without them it would probably never have been written.