Note 754 — Chapter V · BIOGRAPHY.

On Comines, see above, p. 96, note 1. While Comines, as is there indicated, partly owes his power of objective criticism to intercourse with Italians, the German humanists and statesmen, notwithstanding the prolonged residence of some of them in Italy, and their diligent and often most successful study of the classical world, acquired little or nothing of the gift of biographical representation or of the analysis of character. The travels, biographies, and historical sketches of the German humanists in the fifteenth, and often in the early part of the sixteenth centuries, are mostly either dry catalogues or empty, rhetorical declamations.