The Century of Columbus Part 36

"Henry, Earl of Surrey, and Sir Thomas Wyatt, between whom I finde very little difference, I repute them for the two chief lanternes of light to all others that have since employed their pennes upon English Poesie; their conceits were loftie, their stiles stately, their conveyance cleanly, their termes proper, their metres sweete and well proportioned."

To Surrey, English literature owes two important literary innovations--the introduction of the sonnet and the use of polished blank verse. The influence of Italy and of the cla.s.sic authors can be seen very clearly, and his version of the second and fourth books of the AEneid, in what Milton called "English heroic verse without rhyme," was a fundamental influence in English poetry. His sonnets are mainly the amatory effusions which were becoming fas.h.i.+onable everywhere at this time and which Shakespeare indulged in in his turn a little later. Some of his biographers and editors have woven a series of fanciful theories over his relations to the {498} "fair Geraldine," in whose honor many of the best sonnets were written, but it is doubtful whether these love poems are anything more than the wandering poetic fancies of the time. Surrey's unmerited death on the scaffold at the early age of thirty has deepened the romantic interest that attaches to his name as a poet. Sir Thomas Wyatt, though more than a dozen years older than his friend Surrey, must be considered his disciple in poetry. He, too, wrote some of the new sonnets on the theme that occupied so many of the poets of the time--Love--but, as in the case of Surrey also, we have from him some satires and metrical versions of the psalms.

Probably the greatest contribution to the English prose of the time is Sir Thomas More's "Life of Edward V." Mr. Hallam p.r.o.nounced it "the first example of good English--pure and perspicuous, well chosen, without vulgarisms or pedantry." Many others have declared More the first great master of English prose and even the father of English prose. There have been dissentient voices among the critics from these high praises. There is no doubt, however, that More wrote a direct straightforward English that deeply influenced the course of English speech, and tradition has given him a high place among the great English orators. The language undoubtedly received a deep impress from him, and though his most important work in literature is "Utopia,"

written in Latin, his high place in English cannot be denied.

Authorities on English have always recognized this, but owing to religious feelings, and the anti-Catholic tradition created during Elizabeth and James' time, More's work has been neglected, except by the deeper scholars. Samuel Johnson, in the "History of the English Language," prefixed to his dictionary, devotes nearly one-third of all the s.p.a.ce that he takes for his purpose to More. He apologizes somewhat for his copiousness of quotation from the chancellor, but justifies it by saying that, "It is necessary to give a larger specimen both because the language was to a great degree formed and settled and because it appears from Ben Jonson that his works were considered as models of pure and elegant style."

A recent writer, [Footnote 48] Prof. J. S. Phillimore, says of More's style: {499} "His usual prose has the easy elastic abundance of Boccaccio and a lawyer's love of proving a point exhaustively in controversy. But he has all the qualities of a great prose style: sonorous eloquence, less c.u.mbersome than Milton; simplicity and lucidity of argument, with unfailing sense of the rhythms and harmonies of English sound. He is a master of Dialogue, the favorite vehicle of that age; neither too curiously dramatic in the ethopoia of the persons, nor yet allowing the form to become a hollow convention, the objector in his great Dialogue (the Quod he and Quod I) is anything but a man of straw. We can see that if Lucian was his early love he had not neglected Plato either. Elizabethan prose is tawdry and mannered compared with his: at his death Chaucer's thread is dropped, which none picked up till Clarendon and Dryden. With his colloquial, well-bred, unaffected ease, he is the ancestor of Swift.

His style--so Erasmus tells us--was gained by long and careful studies and exercises; he took a discipline in Latin, of which the fruits were to appear in English, when the increasing gravity of the times warned him that it would be well to speak to a larger public than Latin could reach. Even where he is prolix--and that may seem prolix in black-letter folio which reads easy and pleasant enough in modern form--his merry humor is not long silent."

[Footnote 48: _Dublin Review,_ July, 1913.]

As in French, some of the translations into English at this period are almost as admirable prose as Amyot's "Plutarch." Even when the translations of the time have the quaintness of the English of that period, they are admirable in their closeness to the original and in a certain rhythm of their sentences. Of Berner's translation of Froissart's "Chronicles," Snell in "The Age of Transition" ("Handbooks of English Literature," Scribners) says: "The English is so thoroughly idiomatic that in reading it one loses all sensation of the book being merely an interpretation, and resigns one's self to its easy and familiar flow with the same joyful complacency as if it were an original work. On the other hand, if one insists on breaking the spell and comparing it with the French text, one is struck not only with the felicity, but also the fidelity of the rendering."

The literary quality of the prose of the first half of the {500} sixteenth century in England is best revealed in the translations of the Scriptures done into the vernacular at this time and in the unequalled Collects of the English Prayerbook. Tyndale and Coverdale are responsible for the translations of the Scriptures, and to Cranmer is usually attributed the writing of the Collects, though, as has been said by Saintsbury, "this attribution derives but very faint corroboration from the Archbishop's known work." It was with these models of marvellously expressive, thoroughly idiomatic English, exquisite examples of style, that the translators of the King James version of the Bible were placed in a position to give us the wonderful fundamental literary work that was to come from their hand half a century later. It has been said that one argument of the most irresistible kind for the divine authors.h.i.+p of the Scriptures lies in the faculty which they have of making all the translations of them great literature. It was their influence that is felt in the English Prayerbook and in those parts of the Breviary which we owe to the first half of the sixteenth century.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MANTEGNA. ST. GEORGE ]

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CHAPTER VI

SCHOLARs.h.i.+P IN ITALY

One of the most important chapters in the great accomplishment of the men of this century is its scholars.h.i.+p--that is, the critical and appreciative knowledge of what men had written before their time and especially of the great cla.s.sical works of antiquity. In this, almost needless to say, Italy is not only a pioneer, but was the _alma mater studiorum_--of whom Linacre was so proud--for those desirous of knowledge of the cla.s.sics and true scholars.h.i.+p from all over the world. From every country, France, Spain, Germany, distant Poland and Denmark, as well as England, those looking for opportunities for study that could not be obtained at home flocked to Italy. Besides, Italian teachers are to be found teaching everywhere, though Italy herself proved no stepmother to those who came to be nurtured in good learning at her great inst.i.tutions. Many a foreigner who had proved his ability was given a professors.h.i.+p and spent many years in teaching others in Italy as he had been taught himself.

This is the age of printing, and it was of first importance that good editions of the cla.s.sics should be printed as soon as possible in order to prevent any further degeneration of their texts and avoid all further risk of losing the precious treasures of antiquity. Scholars in Italy took up the making of good texts, and within a century after the invention of printing, all the important Greek and Latin authors had been published in scholarly editions, the texts of which still command respect. The amount of labor required for this, the judicious scholars.h.i.+p demanded, the patience that was needed and the unselfish devotion to a most trying task, only scholars can properly appreciate.

No debt that we owe to the Renaissance is greater than this, what it accomplished for cla.s.sical literature, and by far the greater part of this debt is owed to Italy.

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Everywhere, that is, in every important city, there was a school of the New Learning, and usually some munificent patrons of what they came to call Humanism because it represented humanity's highest interests, supporting scholars who were writing and correcting ma.n.u.scripts and afterwards forming libraries of the printed books and making it possible for the great printers to continue their work by subscribing for their first editions. Only that the Church was deeply interested in this new movement, it would have been quite impossible for it to have continued. Unfortunately, as always happens whenever men get new knowledge, many of them, that is, the restless and the smaller minds among them, who are always likely to be in a great majority in any new movement, were taken with the idea that they knew so much more than those who went before them that they could not be expected to accept old-fas.h.i.+oned ideas in religion and philosophy.

Because of the disturbances produced by such restless characters, there sometimes seems at this time to be opposition between the Church and the New Learning. This false impression is partly due to the fact that in certain countries, notably Germany and England, the reform doctrines were, as pointed out by Gasquet, often called the New Learning, to which, of course, there was opposition. Most of the great cla.s.sic scholars, however, were ecclesiastics, some of them of very high rank and influence in the councils of the Church, even Cardinals and Popes, and in general the vast majority of the prominent scholars were in the closest of sympathy with the ecclesiastical authorities.

The exceptions are so few as to make the existence of this rule very clear, though so much of emphasis has been placed on the exceptions in the modern time that an entirely false impression with regard to Church opposition to education has been produced in a great many minds.

The first name that deserves to be mentioned among the scholars of Italy is AEneas Sylvius of the family of Piccolomini, who is better known under the name of Pius II, which he bore as Pope. He is a typical example of the scholars of the Renaissance, in so far as that, as a younger man, his studies of cla.s.sical antiquity led him to the expression of pagan ideas in life as well as in language. At the age of forty he {503} reformed and became as well known for his devotion as for his previous looseness of character. He was created Imperial Poet by the Emperor Frederick III, and his reputation for scholars.h.i.+p created a fas.h.i.+on in this regard that did great good for the rising movement of the New Learning. His influence as Pope continued this, though he made it the main business of his pontificate to organize Europe against the Turks so as to prevent the further increase of their power with all that would mean for the destruction of culture as well as religion. Indeed, his love for letters seems to have been at least as great an incentive for the organization of the crusade as his duty as an ecclesiastic. When he heard of the Fall of Constantinople, he exclaimed, "How many names of mighty men will peris.h.!.+ It is a second death to Homer and to Plato. The fount of the muses is dried up forevermore." How much he was thought of by his contemporaries and how much the example of his scholars.h.i.+p meant will be best appreciated from the Piccolomini Palace and other buildings of Pienza, but particularly the exquisitely beautiful Piccolomini Library at Siena.

Pinturicchio's decorations for this library are only added testimony to the admiration of his generation. Sylvius' letter to Ladislas, the young king of Bohemia and Hungary who had sought his advice with regard to education, is one of the important doc.u.ments in the history of education. It contains the oft-quoted pa.s.sage with regard to the place of memory in education:

"We must first insist upon the overwhelming importance of Memory, which is in truth the first condition of capacity for letters. A boy should learn without effort, retain with accuracy, and reproduce easily. Rightly is memory called 'the nursing mother of learning.'

It needs cultivation, however, whether a boy be gifted with retentiveness or not. Therefore, let some pa.s.sage from poet or moralist be committed to memory every day."

One of the greatest scholars of the period and one of the leaders in the Renaissance movement towards the cla.s.sics which brought about the reawakening of artistic and literary men at this time was Cardinal Bessarion, whose long life of over eighty years gave him nearly a quarter of a century in {504} Columbus' period. He came with the Emperor John Palaeologus to the Council of Ferrara in 1438, where his reputation for scholars.h.i.+p and vast erudition in all theological matters gave him great authority among the Greek Bishops. To him more than any other must be attributed the formal reunion with the Latin Church, which was the happy issue of that Council. To him, therefore, was committed the honor of reading the Greek formula of the Act of Union. Unfortunately, the union was but short-lived, but Bessarion changed to the Latin rite and in 1439 was created Cardinal.

The Cardinal was high in favor with succeeding Popes and just at the beginning of Columbus' Century was sent as papal legate to Bologna, as "an angel of peace," in the hope that he would be able to quell the factional disturbances and pacify the divided interests. Cardinal Bessarion succeeded admirably in this difficult mission, calmed the internal dissensions and succeeded in introducing wise reforms into the city government and the administration of justice. His princ.i.p.al attention, however, was given to the University. He rebuilt the building and gathered there some of the most famous teachers of the world, encouraging particularly the study of the cla.s.sics, and above all of Greek. He himself supplied out of his personal revenues whatever was lacking in the salaries, and he gathered around him a notable band of scholars, writers and poets, and began that magnificent outburst of interest in the intellectual life which was to make Bologna so famous.

He continued to be active in his influence on the scholars.h.i.+p of Italy until well beyond eighty years of age, yet was always a factor in the practical life of his time. When he was eighty-one he wrote for Pope Paul II a letter on the organization of a new crusade against the Turks. When he was eighty-three he went on an emba.s.sy to Paris in order to bring about the union of the Western nations for a crusade.

While at Rome during his later years, Bessarion gathered round him the scholars and writers in all departments. The scientists of the time particularly owe much to his patronage. He was a friend of Peurbach of Vienna, of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, of Regiomonta.n.u.s and many others. In his house the first Accademia was founded, and he was known as the patron of {505} letters. He gathered an immense number of valuable ma.n.u.scripts at very great expense, had copies of others made and gave his treasures at his death to found a library in Venice, his collection forming the nucleus of the famous library of St. Mark.

After these two great Churchmen and patrons of learning and education, there are a series of scholars whose names deserve to be mentioned for the influence which they exerted on the learning of Europe at this time. At the beginning of our century came the Greeks, who were driven out of their native country by the conquest of the Turks. Demetrius Chalcondyles, Theodore Gaza, George Trebizond and Joannes Argyropulos, unable to pursue their studies in peace in the midst of the alarms produced by the Turks, reached Italy before the Fall of Constantinople. Gaza was lecturing on Demosthenes at Ferrara in 1448, where among his pupils was the subsequently distinguished German scholar Rudolph Agricola. The first year of our century Gaza was invited to Rome by Pope Nicholas V to fill the chair of philosophy and take a princ.i.p.al part in the plan which the Pope had conceived for the translation of the princ.i.p.al Greek cla.s.sics. Gaza's translations were mainly concerned with scientific Greek works, Aristotle "On Mechanical Problems" and "On Animals" and Theophrastus' "Botany." For a time he withdrew to a monastery, but was recalled to Rome by Pope Paul II to take part in the _editio princeps_ of Gellius. After the death of Bessarion he retired once more to his monastery, where he died in 1475. His Greek grammar became famous and was used as a text-book by Budaeus in Paris and by Erasmus in Cambridge. He is described by Manutius as easily chief among the Latin and Greek scholars of his age, an age replete with scholars.h.i.+p be it said, and he is eulogized by Scaliger over a century later as _magnus vir et doctus,_ a great man and a learned.

George Trebizond, after teaching for many years in Venice, was invited to Rome, where he became one of the Papal Secretaries. He also took part in the plan for translating the Greek cla.s.sics, and his translations include the "Rhetoric and Problems of Aristotle" and "The Laws and Charmenides of Plato." Argyropulos taught first at Padua and then for {506} fifteen years under the patronage of the Medici at Florence. He, too, was invited to Rome by the Pope and was highly esteemed there. His part in the great plan of translation concerned mainly the works of Aristotle, whose "Ethics," "Politics,"

"Economics," "On the Soul" and "On Heaven" were all printed in his versions. He was the master of Politian, and his lectures were attended by Tiptoff, the Earl of Worcester, and by Reuchlin, the great German humanist. It was to Reuchlin that Argyropulos, after having heard him read and translate a pa.s.sage of Thucydides, exclaimed with a sigh, "Lo! through our exile Greece has flown across the Alps."

Chalcondyles, at the early age of twenty-six, made an immediate conquest of his Italian audience at Perugia in 1450. Subsequently he lectured at Padua, being the first teacher of Greek who received a salary at any of the Universities of Europe. For twenty years he lectured in Florence, and there prepared the _editio princeps_ of Homer, the first great Greek author to be printed. After the death of Lorenzo de Medici he withdrew to Milan and there edited "Isocrates"

and "Suidas." His emendation of Greek texts is the best proof of his scholars.h.i.+p, and few men of his time equalled his power in this. He was noted for the gentleness of his disposition and his integrity of character, and he made many friends. There is a famous picture by Ghirlandajo in Santa Maria Novella at Florence which contains portraits of Ficino, Landino, Politian and Chalcondyles.

The work of all of these men was greatly a.s.sisted by Pope Nicholas V, who was himself distinguished as a scholar in this scholarly time.

During his pontificate in the first years of Columbus' Century he did more for the encouragement of learning than anyone else of the time.

His wide knowledge of ma.n.u.scripts made him personally an expert, and he gathered from all lands and is the founder of the Vatican collection of ma.n.u.scripts. Besides the translations of Aristotle, Thucydides, Herodotus, Xenophon, Polybius and Epictetus, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo and Appian were translated under his direction. The catholicity of his taste, and above all the inclusion of the scientific books of the Greeks, is a tribute to the liberty of spirit of the Pope. On his death-bed he declared that his {507} greatest consolation was that he had been liberal in the rewarding of learned men.

After the Papal influence, the most important factor for the encouragement of scholars.h.i.+p was the academies which were founded at this time. Lorenzo de Medici revived, after an interval of 1200 years, the ancient custom of celebrating the memory of Plato by an annual banquet. Out of this arose the _Accademia_ of Florence, nearly every one of the members of which were distinguished scholars. The best known among them are Landino and Ficino, both of whom had been Lorenzo's tutors, Pico della Mirandola and Politian. The first account that we have of the Academy is to be found in the introduction to Ficino's edition of Plato's "Symposium." He tells that his rendering of all the seven speeches in the "Symposium" was read aloud and discussed by five of the guests. Undoubtedly Ficino was the centre of the _Accademia_ and one of the greatest scholarly influences of the time. At the age of forty he took Holy Orders and was noted for the next twenty-five years, until his death, as a faithful priest whose scholars.h.i.+p was devoted to showing how Plato illuminated Christianity.

In the latter part of his life he lectured on and translated Plotinus.

The best known of these scholars in Florence was undoubtedly Politian, much more interested in Latin than in Greek, though Sandys, in his "History of Cla.s.sical Scholars.h.i.+p" (Cambridge University Press, 1908), says that he was probably the first teacher in Italy whose mastery of Greek was equal to that of the Greek immigrants. Though he died at the early age of forty, we owe to him valuable textual criticisms of Lucretius, Propertius, Ovid, Statius, Ausonius, Celsus, Quintilian, Festus, and Catullus and Tibullus. His monograph on the chronology of Cicero's letters, his discussion of the use of the aspirate in Latin and Greek and of the differences between the aorist and the imperfect as ill.u.s.trated by the signatures of Greek sculptors, as well as his power of solving textual difficulties, made him one of the great contributors to the magnificent work accomplished at this time for cla.s.sical scientific grammar and erudition, as well as for the provision of proper texts of the cla.s.sics for the world. Besides pure {508} literature, he was interested very much in law and made a special study of the "Pandects" of Justinian. He refused to follow those who slavishly imitated Cicero, and denounces the Ciceronians as the mere apes of Cicero. His expressions in the matter are famous. "To myself the face of a bull or a lion appears far more beautiful than that of an ape, although the ape has a closer resemblance to man. But, someone will say you do not express Cicero. I answer I am not Cicero, what I really express is myself."

Academies were formed in other cities and accomplished excellent results for scholars.h.i.+p, though at times they fell under the suspicion of the authorities of dabbling in politics or of actually favoring political factions or even revolutionary ideas. Nearly always they owe their origin to the patronage of high ecclesiastics or those who were in very close sympathy with the Church and always they contained clergymen of distinction. After that of Florence the next in chronological order was that of Rome. There is even some question whether the Roman Academy was not the first in time, only it did not receive this name until after it had been adopted in Florence. The most important figure in the Roman Academy was the man who, for want of a better, a.s.sumed the old Roman name Pomponius Laetus. He was narrow enough of intellect to refuse to learn Greek, because he feared that it would spoil his Latin style. The members of the Roman Academy, under his ruling spirit, celebrated the foundation of Rome on the annual return of the festival of the Palilia, a custom which is still retained by many of the Roman academies. Pomponius did his gardening according to the precepts of Varro and Columella, the Latin writers on agriculture, and nothing pleased him better than to be regarded as a second Cato. It is to him that is due the revival of the regular performances of Plautus' plays.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CORREGGIO, BLESSED VIRGIN AND ST. SEBASTIAN]

Among the most important members of the Academy were Platina, who became the Librarian of the Vatican, and Sabellicus, who afterwards became the Prefect of the Library of San Marco in Venice. For a time, owing to suspicion of its political, perhaps also its religious, tendencies, the Roman Academy was suppressed and some of its members put in prison, but under Pope Sixtus IV it was revived and all its {509} old customs restored. Pomponius wrote commentaries on the whole of Virgil, on Sall.u.s.t and Curtius, on Pliny's letters and Quintilian and on his agricultural favorites, Varro and Columella, and his equally great favorites, Festus and Nonius Marcellus, the grammarians.

In order to complete his similarity with the old Romans, he had expressed the desire at one time in life that after death his body should simply be placed in an ancient Roman tomb on the Appian Way.

When he died at the age of seventy he had changed the views of his earlier years and was given a magnificent Christian funeral. So great was the veneration for his scholars.h.i.+p that his obsequies in the Church of _Ara Coeli,_ in the midst of the Roman antiquities that he had loved so well, were attended, as Gregorovius tells us, by some forty bishops.

This Roman Academy continued to exist, now flouris.h.i.+ng, now occupied with trivialities, as is the way with such inst.i.tutions, until the sack of Rome in 1527. As Sandys says ("Harvard Lectures on the Revival of Learning," Cambridge University Press, 1905), "Its palmy days were in the age of Leo X, when it included the most brilliant members of the literary society of Rome, men like the future Cardinals, Bembo and Sadoleto, as well as Paolo Giovio and Castiglione. It encouraged very much the study of Latin particularly, and its members wrote Latin poems and delivered Latin orations and above all encouraged the development of Roman Archaeology, the preservation of Roman remains of all kinds, the editing of books and the recovery of every possible phase of information with regard to Roman life."

There were minor academies in Rome, one of which, the Vitruvian Academy, occupied itself mainly with architecture. But as was true also at Florence, where there were a number of minor academies, some at least of these were only cloaks for political discussions and organizations, and as a consequence brought other and more serious bodies of the same name under suspicion.

The next academy of importance is that of Naples, which came into existence probably just about the beginning of Columbus' Century during the reign of Alfonso of Aragon, the magnanimous patron of learning. Its most prominent {510} members were Antonio of Palermo, whose Italian name of Beccadelli is often used; Pontano and Sannazzaro, the poets, and Laurentius Valla, the historian and professor of rhetoric. Valla subsequently became professor of rhetoric in Rome at the invitation of Pope Nicholas V, who wanted his a.s.sistance for the carrying out of the great plan of translations from Greek to Latin of all the great authors which he constantly cherished.

Valla became Papal Secretary under Nicholas' successor, Pope Calixtus III, but unfortunately he died at the early age of fifty. He deserves extended notice because he is one of the founders of historical criticism, and he began that denunciation of exaggerated belief in Aristotle very proper in itself, but which unfortunately went too far and led to under-estimation of the medieval scholars who had studied Aristotle so sedulously, and even of Aristotle himself. His discussion of the Donation of Constantine attracted much attention and showed very clearly how scholars.h.i.+p might be used to good purpose for the correction of false notions even long after events had happened.

The _Accademia_ at Venice deserves more than a pa.s.sing mention because, though founded much later than the others, it set itself the very practical purpose of bringing about a systematic publication of the Greek cla.s.sics. It was founded by Aldus in 1500, who called it the New Academy of h.e.l.lenists, and was as strongly Grecian as Pomponius'

Academy was Roman. Its const.i.tution was written in Greek, Greek was spoken at its meetings and Greek names were adopted by its Italian members. Fortiguerra of Pistoia, the Secretary of the Academy, thus became Carteromachus. The princ.i.p.al aim of the Academy was to produce in each month an edition of at least 1,000 copies of some good author.

Among the honorary foreign members were Linacre, some of whose translations Aldus published, and Erasmus, who visited Venice in 1508 and who expressed himself as delighted with the opportunity to take part in the deliberations of the Academy. How successful the Academy was in its purpose of encouraging scholarly printing, all the world knows. Aldus produced no less than 27 _editiones principes_ of Greek authors and Greek works of reference. At the time of his death in 1515 all the {511} princ.i.p.al Greek cla.s.sics had been printed. The Academy had been a large factor in helping him in this magnificent achievement, which meant more for scholars.h.i.+p throughout the whole of Europe than perhaps any other single movement occupying so short a time.

There are many of the scholars of the Renaissance whose names are scarcely known outside of the narrow circle of modern specialists in their departments, though their influence was felt for many generations and their work is worthy of the highest praise. A typical example of these is Ambrogio Calepino, the Augustinian monk, to whom we owe the first great modern Latin dictionary. Under the t.i.tle of "Cornucopia" it appeared first at Reggio in 1502 and was reprinted many times during the sixteenth century. The Alduses at Venice printed no less than eighteen editions of it. This lexicon came to be the groundwork on which subsequent lexicographers, recognizing its merit, built up their larger works. There was an edition of it in seven languages by Facciolati, printed at Pavia in 1718, which was reprinted many times. The name of Calepinus became a synonym for the word dictionary or lexicon and is frequently used, without capitalization as a common noun, in Italy during the subsequent generations. His magnificent work well deserved this recognition, for it is a monument of the cla.s.sical scholars.h.i.+p of the first half of Columbus' Century.

One of the greatest of the Italian scholars of the first half of, Columbus' Century was that distinguished member of the Florentine Academy whose books were the special favorites of Sir Thomas More, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who died at the early age of thirty-one after dreaming the dream of the unity of all knowledge and becoming absorbed in planning a vast work which was to form a complete system of knowledge. He had devoted himself to Greek and to Christian theology and philosophy and even rendered himself liable to suspicion by his delvings into Cabalistic lore and had deeply impressed the generation among whom he lived. His reputation as a marvellous precocious scholar, who died all untimely, still endures, and Sir Thomas More's study and discussion of his works gave him a reputation in England which added greatly {512} to his fame throughout the whole West of Europe. He was happy in his end, for he pa.s.sed away on the very day in which the invader of Italy, Charles VIII of France, marched into Florence.

Scholars.h.i.+p continued to hold the highest place in Italy until political troubles, and above all the sack of Rome in 1527, drew men's minds from peaceful pursuits, scattered libraries and made patronage of scholars.h.i.+p most difficult for rulers and ecclesiastics.

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CHAPTER VII