CHAPTER XXV.

THE RENAISSANCE IN EUROPE

 

In an eloquent letter Gregorius Tifernas expressed the regret felt by the whole humanist world at the death of Nicholas V (1455), He was very nearly succeeded by another humanist, Cardinal Bessarion, but at the last moment the Conclave fought shy of a Greek who wore a beard. So they elected in his place a Spaniard, who was of high character, sound learning, and political capacity, but whose chief recommendation was his age of seventy-eight. The new Pope, who took the title of Calixtus III, devoted his whole energies, which were still considerable, to the furtherance of a crusade against the Turks and to the advancement of his Borgia nephews. In 1458 he was succeeded by Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, and the hopes of the humanists revived. But Pius II was a man of letters rather than a scholar, and he was far too intelligent to rate the pretensions of the humanists at their own value. The greatest of them, Valla, died the year before his election, and Poggio the year after. Filelfo still was left, but, when he clamoured for preferment, the Pope put him off with courteous answers and a few small presents. He shewed, however, that he could appreciate real learning by appointing Niccoló Perotti, the disciple of Valla and the author of the first large Latin grammar of the Renaissance (1468), Archbishop of Manfredonia and by treating with marked consideration Flavio Biondo, who, probably on account of his ignorance of Greek, had been neglected by Nicholas V. It was possibly under the influence of his Roma instaurata that the new Pope issued his brief, Cum almam nostram urbem, for the preservation of those ancient monuments which his predecessor, Nicholas V, for all his love of Rome, had freely used as a quarry.

Pius II represents the critical and inquiring side of the Renaissance. He wrote history in a really critical spirit and he took a keen interest in geography. His Asia was a favourite book in the early days of geographical discovery, and was read by Columbus. Like Petrarch he was a lover and careful observer of nature. There are some charming descriptions of scenery in his Commentaries—of the fields of flax at Viterbo “which imitate the colour of heaven,” of the lakes of Nemi and Albano, and especially of his native Siena and its beautiful neighbourhood.

His successor, Paul II (1464-71), was equally disliked by the humanists, and with better reason. For when Pomponius Laetus (1425-98), as he called himself, a pupil of Valla and a man of sound learning, made his nursling, the Roman Academy, a centre of childish and reactionary protest against the Christian religion, the Pope, taking these proceedings too seriously, suppressed the Academy and threw its leading members into prison. Platina, indeed, who was one of them, says in his malicious biography of Paul II that many of them died under torture, but his statement is not supported by evidence, Paul II was in fact a truer representative of the Renaissance than Platina and his friends, for he loved beauty as few men have loved it and his superb collections included bronzes, pictures, tapestries, medals, coins, and every conceivable form of art After his death the Academy was revived by Sixtus IV. Platina became his librarian and Pomponius Laetus the literary dictator of Rome.

A similar Academy, but literary rather than antiquarian in its aims, was founded at Naples by Antonio Beccadelli under the auspices of King Alfonso shortly before the latter’s death in 1458. Il Panormita, who died in 1471, was succeeded by Giovanni Pontano (1426-1503), who, as the best winter of Latin verse and prose of his century, fully sustained the literary reputation of the Academy. His betrayal to the French of Ferrante II, whose grandfather, Ferrante I, he had served as chief minister for ten years, and who had loaded him with favours, is at once a blot on his fame and a sign of that lack of patriotism which was one of the chief causes of Italy’s decadence. On the other hand, his fellow humanist, Jacopo Sannazaro (1458-1530), who edited his works, remained faithful to the house of Aragon and accompanied his friend and protector, Frederick, the successor of Ferrante II, into exile. His famous Arcadia was first published in a correct and complete form at Naples in 1504, but a considerable part of it was already written in 1490. Sannazaro also wrote six Piscatory Eclogues, in which fishermen take the place of shepherds, and a long Virgilian poem on the birth of Christ (De partu virginis), upon which he spent twenty years.

The Platonic Academy of Florence had a far wider influence than those of Naples or Rome. Founded by Cosimo de’ Medici in 1459, with Marsilio Ficino (1433-91), the son of his physician, who had been carefully trained in Greek philosophy, for its first head, it rose to great importance under Cosimo’s grandson Lorenzo. Its meetings were held at the farm near Careggi which Cosimo had given to Ficino, and it counted amongst its members the chief representatives of Florentine culture. As its name implies, its object was the cult and study of Plato, and it was thus the outcome of the movement which had been inaugurated by Gemistos Plethon at the time of the Council of Florence. In Plethon’s philosophy the teaching of Plato was blended with that of Plotinus and was further corrupted by fantastic interpretations of his own. Bessarion freed himself from his master’s extravagances and did much to restore the pure doctrine of Plato, but Ficino followed rather in the footsteps of Plethon. To the blend of Platonism and Neo-Platonism he added Christian mysticism, and he was thus led to the conception of a “common religion” of which Christianity and other religions were varieties. If this philosophy was but a generous ideal resting on frail foundations, he at any rate did good service by contributing to the spread of spiritual thought in an age of increasing scepticism and materialism, and by his Latin translations of Plato and Plotinus,

His famous disciple, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-94), surpassed him in learning, originality, and even in influence. To Plato and Plotinus he added Arabic writers, the Schoolmen, and the Kabbala. His philosophy was founded on the belief that man is made for happiness, relative in this world, absolute in the next. With Reason and Will to guide him he must ever strive upwards towards his Heavenly Home. As Pico grew in saintliness—“from his face,” says his friend Politian, “shone something divine”—his philosophy became simpler and his religion more definitely Catholic. Yet ritual and outward observance meant little to him; he was wholly absorbed by the love of Christ.

The munificence of Nicholas V and Alfonso I had attracted many humanists to Rome and Naples, but after the death of these patrons Florence speedily regained her primacy as the chief centre of humanism. This was especially marked under the rule of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1469-92), one of whose closest associates, Angelo Poliziano (1454-94), represents a higher type of classical scholarship than had hitherto been reached in Italy. Uniting the critical faculty of a Valla with the literary feeling of a Pontano, he brought to the interpretation of a wide field of Greek and Latin literature a rare combination of learning, critical method, taste, and insight. He lectured on Homer and Virgil, and the Latin writers of the Silver age; he translated Herodian, Epictetus, Hippocrates, and Galen. Claiming to be neither a dialectician nor a jurist but only a grammatical, or literatus, he lectured on Aristotle’s logic, and he edited the Pandects after a systematic collation of the manuscripts.

At the age of sixteen he began his career with a translation of the Iliad into Latin verse, and ten years later (1480) he obtained the chair of Greek and Latin eloquence. So great was his fame that students of all nations thronged to hear him and were held spell-bound by the charm of his voice, the fire of his delivery, and the inspiration of his rhetoric. Each course of lectures was preceded by an introduction illustrating the whole branch of literature of which the author in question was a type. This often took the form of a Latin hexameter poem, for Politian, like Pontano, wrote Latin verse and prose as correctly as Valla and with the ease and freedom of Poggio and Pius II.

If the revival of learning was a stimulus to the invention of printing, the rapid spread of printing contributed greatly to the diffusion of learning. When Politian began his translation of the Iliad in 1470, there were only two towns in Italy, Rome and Venice, which had a printing press. By 1500 the number of towns with presses had reached seventy-three, and many of these presses were devoted almost exclusively to the printing of classical works.

The art of printing was introduced into Italy in 1465 by two Germans, Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, who set up a press in the Benedictine monastery of Santa Scolastica at Subiaco. They began with a Donatus pro puerulis, but no copy of this is known; the first book from their press of which copies exist is Cicero’s De Oratore, and their first dated book the editio princeps of Lactantius (29 October 1465). Then after printing an edition of St Augustine’s De civitate Dei, which was finished 12 June 1467, they moved to Rome, where they carried on their work under the able supervision of Giovanni Andrea, the learned Bishop of Aleria, who was secretary to the Vatican library. But in spite of great industry they could not make their business pay, and in 1472 the bishop wrote in their names to Pope Sixtus IV, giving an account of their labours and imploring him for assistance. Their last venture, they say—a noble edition of Nicholas de Lyra’s Commentary (Expositiones) on the Bible in five volumes—had left them without the means of subsistence. The letter is especially interesting from the fact that the printers give a list of their productions and of the number of copies of each work. Of the twenty eight works enumerated, more than two-thirds are Latin classics. With one exception—the Epistles of St Jerome, of which they issued 550 copies —an edition consisted of 275 or 300 copies.

The next Italian town to follow the example of Rome was Venice, where John of Spires printed Cicero’s Epistolae ad Familiares in 1469. He died in the following year, and his press was carried on first by his brother Wendelin and afterwards (from 1473) by a syndicate. They had formidable rivalry in the press of the distinguished Frenchman, Nicholas Jenson, who, first as sole owner and then as chief partner, issued a large number of Latin classics from 1470 to 1480, the earlier ones being printed in a roman type which has never been surpassed for beauty. Of all the Italian towns Venice was the most active in the cause of printing; between 1470 and 1480 at least a hundred presses were at work there, and by the end of the century this figure had risen to 151.

In 1470 printing was established at Foligno. In 1471 the new art reached Florence, Milan, and seven other towns, and from this time spread rapidly over the rest of Italy. The first printer at Milan was Pamfilo Castaldi with Antonius Zarotus for his assistant. At Florence Bernardo Cennini, the celebrated goldsmith, was till recently regarded as the pioneer with Servius’ Commentary on Virgil—his only known production—but he has been displaced by an anonymous printer. The earliest book in which decipherable Greek type appears is the Subiaco Lactantius, but the first book entirely printed in Greek is the Grammar of Constantine Lascaris, printed at Milan in 1476. Florence made a notable contribution to Greek printing in 1488 with the first edition of Homer, and in 1494 the distinguished Hellenist, Janus Lascaris, established there a Greek press under the management of Lorenzo di Alopa, a Venetian, for which he himself designed the types, consisting at first wholly of capitals. From 1494 to 1496 he issued no less than five editiones principes of Greek classics: the Anthology, four plays of Euripides, Callimachus, Apollonius Rhodius, and Lucian.

In the same year, 1494, in which Janus Lascaris set up his press at Florence, the most famous of Italian printers, Aldus Manutius(1450-1515), a native of Bassiano near Velletri, began printing at Venice. After studying Latin at Rome and Greek at Ferrara under Guarini, he went in 1482 to Mirandola, because its lord, Giovanni Pico, as he wrote to their common friend, Politian, “loved men of letters.” Thence he proceeded to Carpi to become tutor to Pico’s nephew, Alberto Pio, and it was through the latter’s munificence that he was able to carry out his project of settling at Venice as a printer with the special object of printing Greek books. He made a beginning in 1495 with the Grammar of Constantine Lascaris, and in the same year he issued the first volume (the Organon) of the editio princeps of Aristotle. This work, of first-rate importance in the history of learning, was completed in 1498. In 1501 he introduced his famous italic type for a pocket edition of Virgil, the first of those cheap and convenient editions of the classics which were not among the least of his services to humanism. In the same year he founded his Neacademia for the encouragement of Greek studies, and during the remaining fifteen years of his life he was continually adding to his editions of Greek classics and Greek works of reference. They included no less than twenty-five editiones principes.

There is a note of irony in the fact that Aldus’ Greek texts and cheap editions, which did so much for the new learning in general, helped to destroy the primacy of Italy. But so it was. Erasmus indeed spent three years in Italy (1506-9) to perfect his knowledge of Greek, but Budé, Vives, and Melanchthon all learned their Greek north of the Alps.

In art Florence retained her primacy till near the close of the fifteenth century, but as regards Italian art in general there is only space here to call attention to certain features of it which it owed to the inspiration of the Renaissance spirit.

Firstly, there was a marked increase in the influence of classical art. In architecture this was largely due to that remarkable and many-sided man, Leone Battista Alberti (1404-72), whose first important work was the transformation by order of Sigismondo Malatesta of the Gothic church of San Francesco at Rimini into the outward semblance of a classical building (1447-50). For instance, in the facade, unhappily left unfinished, we see the principle of a Roman triumphal arch, of which there was a fine example at Rimini, applied to a Christian church. Some two years later (c. 1452) Alberti published his famous De re aedificatoria, the first modern scientific work on the theory and practice of architecture, in which he corrected and added to Vitruvius by the light of his own observations and studies. In 1460 he built the Palazzo Rucellai at Florence, in which for the first time the pilasters of the facade were used as mere ornament, without serving any structural purpose. Finally, in 1470 he designed for Ludovico Gonzaga the great church of Sant’Andreaat Mantua, which became the type of an ecclesiastical building for nearly three centuries.

From this time Renaissance architecture, which had hitherto been almost confined to Florence, began to develop rapidly in other Italian cities—especially at Rome—where the court of the Palazzo di San Marco, better known by its later name of the Palazzo di Venezia (built for Paul II), is evidently inspired by the Colosseum.

Roman architecture and Roman decorative work in its various forms were studied eagerly by painters as well as by architects, though naturally their influence was confined to backgrounds and accessories. When Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-94) was summoned to Rome by Sixtus IV in 1475 to paint frescoes for the Vatican library, he made drawings, says Vasari, from the various antiquities of the city; and the same writer tells us that Filippino Lippi (1457-1504) studied these antiquities with unwearied diligence. In the Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas, which he painted with other frescoes for Cardinal Caraffa in 1489 in the Dominican Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, not only is the classical architecture a prominent feature, but the whole picture is composed in a spirit of classical symmetry.

In Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), who painted chiefly in Northern Italy, this cult of antiquity became a veritable passion. Its first symptoms were displayed in the frescoes which he painted from 1455 to 1460 in the Church of the Eremitani at Padua, and during the last twenty years of his life it dominated him so completely that in the end his art suffered. The great series of the Triumph of Julius Caesar at Hampton Court (1484-92) is remarkable for grandeur of conception and mastery of execution, but in the Triumph of Scipio (National Gallery), painted in the last year of his life, the artist is so completely obsessed by the spirit of classical relief that he has abandoned colour for monochrome.

It was inevitable that this exaggerated cult of antiquity should bring with it a decline of Christian sentiment. Ghirlandaio and Filippino Lippi, with few exceptions, painted Christian subjects, but they often treated them in a thoroughly secular fashion. Their frescoes, for instance, in Santa Maria Novella are merely pretexts for the portrayal of Florentine social life and the introduction of numerous portraits. Similarly Mantegna’s religious pictures, as might be expected from his devotion to classical antiquity, are often purely pagan in sentiment.

In 1460 Mantegna entered the service of Ludovico Gonzaga, lord of Mantua, and at Mantua he remained, under three generations of its princes, till his death. The Italian despots were now fast becoming rivals of the Church as patrons of art. Sandro Botticelli (1444-1510) was the favourite painter of Lorenzo de’ Medici; Melozzo da Forli (143894) was for three years at Urbino in the service of Duke Federigo; Cosimo Tura (1420 P-1495) was employed by Borso d’Este, the first Duke of Ferrara, and his brother Ercole I for the greater part of his life.

Piero de’ Franceschi (1416-1492) was employed in turn by Sigismondo Malatesta, Federigo Montefeltro, and Borso d'Este. It was natural that these lay-patrons should give commissions for mythological subjects and portraits, but on the whole religious subjects still greatly preponderate. Botticelli painted for Lorenzo de’ Medici two masterpieces, Spring and the Birth of Venus, but his non-religious pictures only amount to about a third of his work. A very small proportion of Mantegna’s work is pagan in subject. Cosimo da Tura painted only religious pictures, and, except for the famous portrait group which commemorates the opening of the Vatican library by Sixtus IV and the ruined fresco of Pesta-Pepe, the same may be said of Melozzo da Forli.

It was at Venice, in the last decade of the fifteenth century, that the emancipation of painting from the control of the Church definitely began. The Vivarini, Carlo Crivelli (1430P-1493?), and Giovanni Bellini (c. 1429-1516), during the greater part of his career, painted religious subjects with genuine religious feeling; but later the demand arose for the representation of pageants and processions, and in Gentile Bellini (c. 14281507) and Vittore Carpaccio (1450-1522) the Venetian State and the “Schools” or Confraternities found men to provide them with pictures instinct with joy and colour. But it was Giorgione (1476 or 1477-1510), a pupil of Giovanni Bellini, who, uniting a rare sense of beauty with a romantic imagination, made mythological and other non-religious subjects an increasingly important feature of Venetian art.

A third Renaissance feature of much of the Italian art of this time is its scientific spirit. We saw in the last volume how zealously the Umbrian painter, Piero de’ Franceschi, applied himself to the technical problems of his art. He had disciples in Melozzo da Forli and Luca Signorelli (1441-1523), of whom the latter was a precursor of Michelangelo in the study of the nude, while both, like Mantegna before them, were masters in the art of foreshortening. But the chief home of this scientific spirit was still Florence, and its chief exponent was Antonio Pollaiuolo (1432-98). He “treated his nude figures,” says Vasari, “in a manner which approaches more nearly to that of the moderns than was usual with the artists who had preceded him; he dissected many human bodies to study the anatomy, and was the first (i.e. painter) who investigated the action of the muscles in this manner, that he might afterwards give them their due place and effect in his works.” A good example of the result of this anatomical study is the small picture of Hercules and Antaeus in the Uffizi, in which the muscles of Hercules stand out with the effort he is making to crush his antagonist. But Pollaiuolo was a greater sculptor than painter, and his superb tomb of Sixtus IV in St. Peter’s testifies to his unsurpassed knowledge of the human form and to the freedom and certainty of his execution. Yet the absence not only of religious sentiment but of all religious emotion shews that the scientific spirit had stifled in him the more vital principles of art. With less genius than Pollaiuolo, Andrea Verrocchio (1435-88), whose many-sided proficiency was remarkable even among the many-sided artists of Florence, shewed equal devotion to the study of artistic problems. His influence was widespread, and it is not his least title to fame that he was the master of Leonardo da Vinci.

Those who hold that the Renaissance was something more than the normal development of civilisation have their justification in Leonardo (1452-1519). In the whole history of the human race has any man appeared who was more variously or more splendidly gifted? Supreme as painter and sculptor, yet ever haunted by an elusive ideal of perfection, he solved as if by instinct the problems upon which his predecessors had laboured so assiduously. His first important painting was The Adoration of the Magi, which he left unfinished at Florence when he entered the service of Ludovico Sforza in 1483. But unfinished though it is, it marks an epoch in painting—the beginning of the High Renaissance. To begin with, it introduced an arrangement in the composition of a picture—the triangular one—which has held the field for more than four centuries. Of a higher order of importance is the fact that Leonardo broke with tradition by placing the Virgin and the Child in the central foreground and by directing towards them the eager looks and gestures of the many figures with which he surrounded them. Thus the psychic interest of the scene receives its true importance, and the Adoration of the Magi becomes no longer a processional pageant or an occasion for the glorification of the artist’s patrons, but an act of the deepest significance—a true adoration. The same principle, though with greater knowledge and greater mastery of execution, governs the miraculous Last Supper, completed in 1493, but begun many years earlier. Upon the central figure of Christ are focused the movements, the gestures, and, except for the group on the extreme right, the looks of all the Apostles. The consternation which followed the “One of you shall betray me” is seized at its supreme moment of passionate intensity. After the downfall of his patron Leonardo left Milan, and during his residence at Florence with short intervals from 1500 to 1506 he painted the Virgin and St Anne and the haunting portrait of Monna Lisa. Wonderful though he was as an artist, he was even more wonderful as a man of science. He was famous as an engineer and some of his greatest achievements were in mechanics. In astronomy, physics, physiology, human and comparative anatomy, physical geography, geology, and botany (especially as a branch of biology), he anticipated many modern researches. Above all things he believed in the scientific spirit. He regarded the senses as the only road to scientific knowledge and experience as the only test of truth.

Leonardo’s discoveries, except so far as they took a practical shape, were little known in his own day, being confided to his note-books, which have only been printed, and not yet in entirety, in quite modern times. The most celebrated Italian man of science of the fifteenth century was the Florentine, Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli (1397-1482), the friend of Brunelleschi and Alberti, of Nicholas of Cusa and Regiomontanus. He wrote treatises on perspective and meteorology, but he was chiefly famous as an astronomer and geographer; and he left behind him a flourishing school of geography. Of this school was Francesco Berlinghieri, a member of Lorenzo de1 Medici’s circle, whose maps of France, Spain, Italy, and Palestine were the first modern maps to be printed, and thus mark an epoch in cartography. The story that Toscanelli encouraged Columbus to proceed upon that momentous voyage from the East to the West which had so profound an influence upon modem thought is now regarded as of doubtful authenticity. Italy also furnished eminent explorers in Ca da Mosto, John Cabot, Amerigo Vespucci, and Giovanni Verrazzano. In pure mathematics the most eminent Italian was Luca Pacioli, one of Leonardo’s few intimate friends, whose mathematical treatise, the first ever printed, appeared in 1494, forty years before that of Regiomontanus. The study of anatomy also began to revive in the last decade of the fifteenth century. Marc’ Antonio dalla Torre, another friend of Leonardo, though he was only twenty-nine when he died in 1511, was regarded as the greatest anatomist of his day, and Giacomo Berengario of Carpi, who was professor of surgery at Bologna from 1502 to 1527, had also a high reputation as an anatomist. This scientific spirit, whether it manifested itself in actual discovery, of which as yet there was very little, or in the advance of art as the result of observation and experiment, or in the historical criticism of a Valla or a Flavio Biondo, is a side of the Renaissance which must not be left out of account. For it is the fruit of that freedom of thought, of that questioning of tradition and authority in the light of personal experience, which justifies us in defining the Renaissance as the transition from the medieval to the modern world.

The spirit of free inquiry naturally made itself felt also in the domain of religion. But at the close of the fifteenth century rationalism was neither widespread nor aggressive. Its centre was the University of Padua, where, in opposition to the Platonists of the Florentine Academy, the professors of philosophy studied Aristotle—but with the exception of Ermolao Barbaro (1454-93), who was an orthodox Catholic—on heterodox lines and with special attention to one topic, the nature of the soul. The majority, with Alessandro Achillini (1463-1512) at their head, adhered to the old pantheistic teaching of Averroes. On the other hand, Pietro Pomponazzi (1462-1522), who championed the materialistic views of Aristotle’s commentator, Alexander of Aphrodisias (c. 200), had great influence both in Italy and later in France and is regarded as the father of modern rationalism. But his chief work, the De immortalitate animae, did not appear till 1516, well beyond the limits of this survey.

We must now go back fifty years and trace the first beginnings of the Renaissance in the countries on this side of the Alps. In France, Charles V and his brothers, with their munificent patronage of art and learning, their many palaces, their libraries, their collections of gems and precious stones and tapestries, were like Renaissance princes, and their courts at the close of the fourteenth century vied with those of Italy in splendour and extravagance. Charles V himself was a real lover of learning, and his library, which numbered about 1100 volumes, reflected his tastes. It contained Latin versions of the Timaeus and of the principal works of Aristotle, nearly the whole of Seneca’s prose works, Ovid’s Heroides, Tristia, Epistolae, and Ex Ponto, Lucan, and Frontinus. There were also French translations of Aristotle, Seneca, and Ovid. Charles, like his father, John the Good, took a keen interest in the work of translating ancient authors. In particular he employed Nicole Oresme to produce French versions through the Latin of Aristotle’s Ethics, Politics, Economics, De caelo, and De mundo.

The Duke of Berry cared more for art than for learning. About half of his three hundred manuscripts were richly illuminated by the best artists of the day. Among them were a Terence, Virgil’s Eclogues, and a book of Pliny, all authors unrepresented in the royal collection. He had even a Greek book, but as to its author or its contents his cataloguer is silent. In the next generation the same munificence and the same patronage of art was shewn by Charles’ younger son Louis, Duke of Orleans, who married Valentine Visconti, the daughter of Gian Galeazzo.

There were also at this time a few real students of classical literature, chief among them being the three distinguished alumni of the College of Navarre, Pierre d’Ailly, Nicolas de Clamanges, and Jean Gerson. As a precursor of the Renaissance the more important of the three is Nicolas de Clamanges, for he was the initiator of a French humanist movement independent of Italy. He possessed a complete Quintilian, discovered in France twenty years before Poggio’s discovery at St Gall; he knew many of Cicero’s speeches, which he may have found in the monastery at Cluny; and he had certainly explored the library at Langres and the various libraries at Paris. In a letter to an Italian friend he says: “I have lectured on Tully’s Rhetoric in the Paris University, and sometimes on Aristotle, and there are often lectures on those great poets Virgil and Terence.” His correspondence reveals a fairly wide knowledge of Latin classical literature, including so rare an author as Tibullus.

But like Pierre d’Ailly and Gerson he was in the first place a theologian; indeed during the latter part of his life he gave himself up entirely to the study of theology. On the other hand his friend Jean de Monstereul, though in Orders, was a humanist pure and simple, who got his humanism from Italy. He was a great admirer of Petrarch and Salutati, and his enthusiasm for Virgil and Cicero was doubtless inspired by their writings. He had an almost equal enthusiasm for Terence, but there are few Latin authors with whom his letters do not shew some acquaintance. He was also a successful searcher after manuscripts, many of his finds coming from Cluny. He introduced into France Plautus (eight comedies), Cato De agricultura, Varro De re rustica, and Vitruvius, and he knew the Bellum civile, which was unknown in Italy, and fragments of Petronius. In 1412 he was sent on a mission to Rome, where he made friends with Leonardo Bruni. Six years later he perished in the massacres of the Armagnacs by the Burgundians at Paris, and the movement which he represented withered away under the anarchy, disunion, and foreign conquest which harried France for the next thirty years. Even when the kingdom began to recover from its wounds, humanism was slow to make a fresh beginning. In 1458, indeed, the distinguished Italian humanist, Gregorius Tifernas, was appointed professor of Greek in the University of Paris, but he only held his professorship for a year and a half.

Louis XI did much to promote intercourse between France and Italy by diplomatic missions, and the men whom he chose for his work were generally sympathetic towards humanism. Indeed, one of these, Jean Jouffroy, Bishop of Albi, who had lectured on canon law at Pavia for three years and in later life had resided in Italy, was fairly well read in Latin literature and had some knowledge through Latin translations of Greek authors.

But the chief event, from the point of view of humanism, of the reign of Louis XI was the introduction of printing into France. In 1470 Guillaume Fichet, a native of Savoy, and Johann Heynlin, a German, both doctors of the Sorbonne, induced three Germans, Michael Friburger, Ulrich Gering, and Martin Krantz, to set up a press within the precincts of the Sorbonne. Both Fichet and Heynlin were zealous humanists and with few exceptions the books printed by the new press were of a humanistic character. The first was the Epistolarum opus of Gasparino Barzizza, and among the twenty-one other works were eight editions of Latin classical authors. But before the end of 1472 Fichet went to Italy with his friend Cardinal Bessarion, and at the beginning of 1478 Friburger and Krantz also left France. For the next sixteen years the books printed at Paris entirely lost their humanistic character. Romances, devotional works, and the text-books of the old learning entirely took the place of Latin classics and treatises on rhetoric.

Meanwhile Robert Gaguin, General of the Trinitarians, who had attended the lectures of Gregorius Tifernas, carried on as best he could the work which his friend Fichet had laid down. He himself lectured on Latin rhetoric at the Sorbonne, and Guillaume Tardif, a native of Le Puy, gave lectures on the same subject at the College of Navarre. From 1476 to 1478 Filippo Beroaldo of Bologna, a scholar of wide learning, also lectured at Paris, and in 1476 there arrived a native of Greece, George Hermonymos, who, though an incompetent teacher, did good service as a copyist of Greek manuscripts. He remained at Paris till at least as late as 1508. Rather later arrivals were the two Italians, Girolamo Balbi and Fausto Andrelini, men of second-rate ability and third-rate character, but who by virtue of a certain facility in the writing of Latin verse and prose became highly popular as lecturers and were regarded by their uncritical audiences as miracles of learning. In the memorable year 1494 in which Charles VIII crossed the Alps humanism in France had not reached beyond the stage of Latin rhetoric, a stage which Italy had reached just a hundred years earlier.

Considering the short time—less than fourteen months—that Charles VIII spent in Italy, it may be thought that historians have exaggerated the importance of the journey to Naples. But if Charles and his nobles had no time, except at Naples, for more than hurried glances, certain features of the Italian Renaissance seem to have strongly impressed them, particularly the spacious palaces, the well planned gardens, and the beautiful sepulchral monuments. They noted too the growing fashion for portraiture. Moreover, if the majority were rude soldiers of little or no culture, there were a few who shewed their appreciation by trying to reproduce what they saw in their own country. Charles himself in his unbalanced fashion had a genuine love of art and literature, and he gave practical help to the introduction of the Italian Renaissance into France by establishing at Amboise a small colony of twenty-one Italian artists and workmen. Among their number was the distinguished architect, Fra Giocondo of Verona, and a younger architect, Domenico of Cortona, sur-named II Boccadoro, who had been a pupil of Giuliano da San Gallo. Sculpture was represented by Guido Mazzoni of Modena, called II Paganino, whose crudely realistic Entombment at Naples with contemporary portraits had made a great impression on the French king, and by Girolamo Pachiarotti, who did much excellent work as a decorator.

France possessed a great national tradition in architecture and her master-masons were men of much skill and long experience. The Italian influence was, therefore, naturally slow in making itself felt. Though the chateau of Amboise has suffered so much from successive demolitions and alterations that it is difficult to make out its history, it is clear that it owed little to Italy—practically nothing but the great spiral staircases of the two towers, which were made with so gentle an incline that a horse could be ridden up them, and the ornamentation of the pendants of the vault in the southern tower. We have even less knowledge about the chateau of Le Verger, which Pierre de Rohan, Marechai de Gie, began to build in 1495 on the site of a former building. The chateau itself has been totally destroyed, but it appears from some seventeenth-century engravings that the only Renaissance features were the general symmetry of the plan and the symmetrical arrangement of the windows in one of the blocks. Of Mazzoni’s activity in France before 1500 there is no record, and with two or three exceptions no Italian sculptor who executed commissions in France before the death of Louis XII seems to have been allowed a free hand. France, indeed, possessed in Michel Colombo a veteran sculptor of high merit who was decidedly superior to Mazzoni and the other Italians in France in both conception and execution.

There were no painters in the Italian colony at Amboise, and the only foreign influence to which at this time French painting was subject was Flemish. The only work of art of the period—its date cannot be later than 1503—which clearly reveals in the idealism of its treatment and the forethought of its design the inspiration of the Italian Renaissance is a triptych of the Virgin in Glory in the sacristy of Moulins Cathedral. The painter is unknown, but he is provisionally called the Maitre de Moulins and on the evidence of style eight other pictures have been ascribed to him. Only one of these, however, the portrait of a young girl from eight to ten—presumably Suzanne de Bourbon— has any look of the Renaissance.

We may now return to humanism, and here we find that in the six years which elapsed between 1495 and 1501 some progress was made. In 1495 Robert Gaguin, who, as we have seen, was the leader of the humanistic movement at Paris and whose high reputation as a diplomatist and man of affairs was of great value to the movement, produced, under the title of De origine et gestis Francorum Compendium, a history of his country, in which the style, however defective, was at any rate modelled upon the chief writers of Latin prose. Among his fellow-workers in the cause of humanism were Charles Fernand and his brother Jean and Pierre de Bur or Bury, a writer of Latin verse, whom his friends proclaimed to be almost the equal of Horace. All three were natives of Bruges. Guy Jouennaux, better known as Guido Juvenalis, was born at Le Mans; his commentary on Terence and his abridgement of Valla’s Elegantiae were favourite text-books in the French universities.

From 1494 onwards a change in the direction of humanism began to take place in the productions of the Paris press. Many of the chief Latin classical authors were printed in whole or in part, Virgil being by far the most popular; and grammars and aids to Latin composition by Italian humanists began to supersede the time-honoured Donatus, Doctrinale, and Grecismus. This latter reform was chiefly the work of a Fleming, Josse Badius Ascensius of Ghent (1461 or 1462-1535), who had studied first in the school of the Brethren of the Common Life at Ghent, then at Louvain, and finally in Italy, where he had learnt Greek at Ferrara from the younger Guarino. In 1492, after holding a professorship at Valence, he migrated to Lyons and early in 1499 settled permanently in Paris, where he acted as general adviser to Jean Petit, the leading publisher and bookseller of that city, prior to setting up a press of his own. Before leaving Lyons he had edited various classical authors with notes for the use of young students, and this work he continued at Paris. With regard to grammars he proceeded in a conservative spirit, contenting himself for a time with preparing a revised edition of the popular Doctrinale. The first Italian text-book on the art of writing Latin to be printed at Paris, where it soon became popular, was Dati’s Elegantiolae, and students were encouraged to read the collected letters of distinguished Italian humanists. Badius edited such a collection, made by Politian, in 1499.

Other universities besides Paris gave the new studies a more or less favourable reception. Chief among these was Orleans, where Reuchlin was a law-student from 1478 to 1480 and gave lessons in Greek and Hebrew. At Poitiers, during the last five years of the fifteenth century, several books of a humanistic character were printed, and at Caen, where there was a close connexion between the printing and bookselling trades and the university, a beginning was made. Lyons, which came nearest to Paris in intellectual activity, had no university, but it had a college at which Badius was professor of Latin from 1492 to 1499. Moreover, Trechsel’s press, which was under his management, and other presses in that city issued editions of a few selected Latin classical authors, chiefly for educational purposes.

But up till now humanism in France was almost confined to rhetoric, that is to say, to the reading of Latin authors and the practice of composition in Latin verse and prose. The entry, therefore, of Janus Lascaris (c. 1445-1535?), a Greek who was also a thoroughly competent Greek scholar, into the service of Charles VIII towards the close of 1496 was an event of first-rate importance. His preoccupation with public affairs prevented him from giving regular instruction, but he was always willing to help serious students. Such a student was Guillaume Bude (1468-1540), who had begun his Greek studies about the year 1494, and who with some valuable help from Lascaris made such progress that the fame of his learning reached the ears of Charles VIII. By 1505 he had translated four treatises of Plutarch into Latin.

Unlike Budé, Jacques Lefevre of Staples in Picardy (c. 1455-1536) never became a great Greek scholar, but he earned the right to be called the doyen of French humanists, as he was the doyen of French Reformers, by his successful reform of the study of Aristotle in the university. He effected this partly by introducing into France the new translations made by Italian humanists, and partly by writing greatly improved text-books.

In 1495, the greatest man of the Northern Renaissance, Erasmus (1467-1536), began his connexion with Paris, residing there almost continuously till May 1499, and again from February 1500 to May 1501. But when he arrived he was an unknown student, nor during his first residence at Paris does he seem to have taken much part in its humanistic life. It was not till his return in 1500 that he applied himself seriously to the study of Greek, and published at Paris the first edition of his Adagia. His real influence on French humanism is of later date, but it was all the more powerful because it fell upon congenial soil. His sense of the importance of education, his appreciation of the moral seriousness of the best pagan literature, and generally bis conception of the new learning as an instrument of life, found a ready response from the Paris humanists. Gaguin and his friends, of whom the majority were ecclesiastics, were seriously minded men. They led exemplary lives; they were good citizens and true Christians. They were also thoroughly convinced of the need for reform in the Church, and, when Lefèvre of Staples, who devoted himself more and more to theological studies, initiated a conservative movement in the direction of reform, it was only natural that his evangelical teaching should at first find a warm welcome with the great majority of his fellow-humanists.

If in the last five years of the fifteenth century humanism made a distinct, though slow, progress in France, literature remained stagnant. It was something perhaps that Octavien de Saint-Gelais (c. 1465-1502), Bishop of Angouleme, the author of a long allegorical poem, Le seéjour d’honneur, should make verse translations of the Heroides and the Aeneid and so introduce them to a larger circle of readers, but the style of his work was far too humdrum to give any idea of the classical spirit. The only French writer before Marot who came under the influence of the Renaissance was Jean Lemaire de Beiges (1472 or 1473-c. 1515?), and his first work of any importance was not published till 1504.

The Renaissance in the southern provinces of the Netherlands developed on similar lines to the Renaissance in France and more or less looked to Paris as its centre. Robert Gaguin and Josse Badius were Flemings by birth. Charles Fernand of Bruges (c. 1460-1517) and his brother Jean (alive in 1494) were professors in the Paris University, and Pierre de Bur (1430-1504), also of Bruges, who had spent seven years in Italy, was a canon of Amiens and resided chiefly in Paris. Arnold Bost (1450-99), however, who was a man of wide learning as well as a Latin scholar, remained in his Carmelite monastery at Ghent, from which he corresponded with humanists of all nations. The two Flemish cities in which printing was the most active were Antwerp and Louvain, but at Antwerp Gerard Leeu (1454-93) out of over 130 books only produced two classics, a Persius and a Seneca. At Louvain John of Westphalia (1474-96) has to his credit a Virgil, an Ovid, a Cicero, a Seneca, and a Quintilian. He also printed Dati’s Elegantiolae, while another Louvain printer produced an edition of Perotti’s Latin grammar.

In the northern provinces of Holland, on the other hand, there was a close connexion with Germany, and Deventer, where Geart (Gerard) Groote (1340-84) established a community of clerks, who came to be known as the Brethren of the Common Life, may be regarded as the common cradle of humanism for both countries. The schools in which the Brethren taught, and which spread rapidly through Holland and Germany, combined the study of the Latin classics with that of the Bible. But their attitude towards their authors was purely medieval, and not till 1483, when Alexander Hegius (1433-98), of Heck in Westphalia, became headmaster of Deventer, can humanism be said to have penetrated their schools.

But before we come to Hegius we must go back to a man, who, according to a widely accepted tradition, received his early education at Deventer, and who is the greatest name, before Erasmus, of the Northern Renaissance. This was Nicholas of Cues (1400 or 1401-64), a small village on the Moselle, later known as the Cardinal of Cusa. Much of his great and various activity lies outside our province. With the champion of the conciliar movement, who afterwards became the strong supporter of Pope Eugenius IV, with the philosopher who wrote the De docta ignorantia, with the mystic who wrote the De Visione Dei, we have nothing to do. But Nicholas claims our attention as a humanist who had very few predecessors in Europe north of the Alps. After a year and a half at Heidelberg he studied law—chiefly canon law—for six years at Padua and received there his doctorate (1423). Then he visited Rome, studied theology at Cologne, and became secretary to Cardinal Orsini—a step which brought him into close relations with the Italian humanists. His famous discovery of twelve new plays of Plautus in 1429 has been related in the previous volume, but he was always a diligent searcher after manuscripts and during his embassy to Constantinople in 1436 he collected many Greek ones. Most of these latter were dispersed, but his library, which he left to the hospital founded by him at Cues, was a considerable one and in spite of many losses is still represented by about 270 volumes. Conspicuous among them are translations, made by the Italian humanists of his day, of the Greek philosophers, historians, and patristic writers. Nor was Nicholas only a humanist. He was keenly interested in various branches of science. Like his friend Toscanelli, whose acquaintance he made at Padua, he was a geographer and an astronomer; he made the first map of Central Europe, and in his belief in the earth’s motion he was a forerunner of Copernicus. He wrote several treatises on mathematics and a remarkable dialogue on statics, to which Leonardo da Vinci, who was one of his chief admirers, owed not a little.

We may now return to Hegius. He warn teacher and he had already had a long experience in teaching, first at Wesel and then at Emmerich, when he came to Deventer, in 1483, and breathed into the old studies the new spirit of humanism. His reforms are closely reflected in the productions of the Deventer press, which, established in 1477, shewed at this time in the hands of its two printers, R. Paffroed and J. de Breda, the same remarkable activity as the Deventer copyists who had preceded it. Educational texts of a humanistic tendency—Virgil’s Eclogues, Horace’s Ars Poetica, Cicero’s De Senectute and De Amicitia, Baptista Mantuanus, Dati’s Elegantiolae, Filelfo’s Latin letters—were produced in increasing numbers. Greek, too, which Hegius, when past forty, had learnt at Emmerich from Agricola, became a regular part of the teaching, at least in the highest forms.

Among Hegius’ pupils, who before his death numbered 2200, were many who became men of mark. The greatest was Erasmus, but there was also Hermann von dem Busch (1468-1534) of Minden, who wrote Latin verse and commentaries on the Latin poets.

Deventer’s nearest rival, hardly less flourishing, was Zwolle. Among its students was Johann Wessel (1419 or 1420-1489) of Groningen, known as “The Light of the World,” who, after three years at Cologne, where he managed to learn Greek and Hebrew, studied theology at Paris. About 1475 he returned to his northern home, where, except for a brief interval of lecturing at Heidelberg, he lived for the remainder of his days, dividing his time between a house of nuns at Groningen, of which he was head, and the monastery of Mount St Agnes. But he also paid frequent visits to the Cistercian abbey of Adwert near Groningen, which became a centre for the meeting of scholars. Here he met Hegius and Rudolf von Langen (1438-1519), whose knowledge of Latin, when he was sent on a mission to Rome, won the admiration of Sixtus IV, and who established a school at Munster which rivalled those at Deventer and Zwolle, and, greatest of all, Rudolf Agricola (1444-85).

Agricola wrote little, but he made a profound impression upon his contemporaries. He impressed them by his splendid personality, his eager pursuit and rapid mastery of learning, his artistic gifts—he was an accomplished musician and a skilled draughtsman—and his athletic prowess. More than any northerner he answered to the Italian conception of an uomo universale. Born in a village twelve miles north of Groningen, he studied in turn at Erfurt, Louvain, and Cologne, wasting (as he puts it) six years over scholastic philosophy in the last-named university. Then followed a fruitful residence of ten or eleven years in Italy, during which he studied law and rhetoric at Pavia and Greek under Theodore Gaza at Ferrara. In 1479 he returned to his home and for four years held a post under the municipal council of Groningen, a post which involved employment on various official missions. Then in 1484 he accepted an invitation from the Bishop of Worms, Johann von Dalberg (1445-1503), who had been his pupil at Pavia, to become a member of his household and to give such teaching as he pleased at Heidelberg. A year later he died in the bishop’s arms.

Johann von Dalberg, who was a man of learning as well as a patron of it, was Chancellor to Philip the Count Palatine, and it was largely owing to him and his master that Heidelberg became a centre of humanism, Even in the time of Frederick the Victorious a beginning had been made. In 1456, Peter Luder, a wandering “poet,” who had studied in Italy, was engaged by Frederick to lecture on the Latin poets, but after struggling for four years with the “wild beasts” (as he calls them) of the university he moved to Erfurt, where he met with a much more favourable reception, thence to Leipzig and finally to Basle, where we last hear of him in 1474. Luder was followed at Heidelberg by Wimpheling, who lectured there from 1471 to 1483, Wessel (c. 1477), and, as we have seen, Agricola. Then, in the last decade of the century, came Celtes, Reuchlin, and, for a second time, Wimpheling. All three were of considerable importance in the history of German humanism.

Conrad Celtes (1459-1508), of Wipfeld on the Main, whose real name was Pickel, studied for seven years at Cologne, and then, having learnt some Greek from Agricola at Heidelberg, spent six months in Italy to improve his knowledge of that language. It does not appear that he ever became a really competent Greek scholar, but he was distinguished as a writer of Latin verse, and in 1487 Frederick III conferred on him the poet’s crown at Nuremberg. From that time he devoted himself with untiring energy to the spread of humanism. He spent two years at Cracow, he visited Silesia, Bohemia, and Hungary, he founded humanistic societies in Hungary and Poland, and, returning to Heidelberg in 1491, founded “The Literary Society of the Rhine” with Mayence for its headquarters and Dalberg for its president. Among its members were not only the Heidelberg humanists, Reuchlin and Wimpheling, but Trithemius, the Abbot of Sponheim, Peutinger of Augsburg, Pirkheimer of Nuremberg, and the distinguished jurist, Ulrich Zasius (1461-1536) of Freiburg. Celtes’ stay at Heidelberg was a brief one. From 1494 to 1497 he held a professorship at Ingolstadt, and in the latter year, as will appear later, he was summoned to Vienna. Though he had no greater love of Italy than the other members of the Rhenish society, Celtes belonged to a type of humanist more common in Italy than in Germany. He was an assiduous writer of Latin verse, regarding himself as the German Horace, and both in his philosophy and in his life he was largely guided by semi-pagan ideas.

Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522), who came to Heidelberg in 1496, was a man of higher character and sounder learning. He had studied at Freiburg, Paris, and Basle, in which last university he learnt Greek from a Greek and took his Master’s degree. From 1478 to 1480 he studied law and taught Greek and Hebrew at Orleans. In 1482 he became secretary to Eberhard I, Duke of Wurtemberg, who took him to Rome. After a second visit to Italy in 1490 and a third in 1498 he returned to Stuttgart, where he spent the next twenty years. His main interest was now in Hebrew, which he had studied in Italy, and it was as a Hebrew scholar that he was attacked by the obscurantists of his day. But this memorable struggle between the forces of conservatism and those of progress, between medieval theology and humanism, lies outside our limits.

Jakob Wimpheling (1450-1528), who was more theologian than humanist, is chiefly famous as an educational reformer. A native of Schlettstadt in Alsace, he received his early education in the famous school of his native town which Ludwig Dringenberg, a pupil of the Brethren of the Common Life, had recently reorganised with great success on humanistic lines. Having studied at Freiburg, Erfurt, and Heidelberg, he taught for twelve years in the last-named university. Then for fourteen years (1484-98) he held the post of Preacher in the cathedral of Spires. During his second visit to Heidelberg, he wrote his famous Adolescentia (1498-1501). For the rest of his long life he rang the changes between Basle, Freiburg, Heidelberg, Strasbourg, and his native Schlettstadt. Thus, except for a year’s residence at Erfurt, he was never far from that Rhine which he loved as a symbol of the German nation.

The friendship between him and Johann of Trittenheim, or Trithemius, (1462-1516) began at Heidelberg, where the latter was studying Latin and Hebrew. In 1482 he entered the Benedictine abbey at Sponheim, near Kreuznach, and sixteen months later was elected abbot. Here he devoted himself to learning and to the welfare of his abbey, giving special attention to the library. In 1502 it numbered 1646 volumes and three years later 2000 volumes. It possessed works in many languages, ancient and modem. The Greek patristic writers were well represented by manuscripts; the printed books (purchased in Italy) included the Iliad and the Odyssey, Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, both of Theophrastus’ works on Plants, and the Theogony ascribed to Hesiod. Trithemius was a voluminous writer; his De scriptoribus ecclesiastics (1494), dedicated to Dalberg, is, in spite of inaccuracies, an important source of information for the early days of northern humanism, and his Catalogue illustrorum virorum Germaniae (1495) has two prefaces, by himself and Wimpheling, which eloquently express their patriotism and their jealousy of Italy.

We have seen that Wimpheling after his second departure from Heidelberg spent some time at Basle and Strasbourg. Both were important centres of humanism. At Basle, which was a free city of the Empire till 1501, a university was founded in 1460, and almost from the first it had the advantage of the sage and enlightened guidance of Johann Heynlin of Stein (c. 1430-96), otherwise known as Johannes a Lapide. At once a schoolman and a humanist, he came to Basle from Paris in 1464, taught there for two years, returned to Paris, where, as we have seen, he helped Fichet to set up the press in the Sorbonne (1470), came back to Basle for four years (1474-78), and finally after ten years of wandering spent the rest of his life first at Basle itself and then in a neighbouring Carthusian monastery. Here he edited Latin Fathers, worked at Aristotle and Cicero, and continued to be the central figure of humanism in the university.

His most intimate friend was Sebastian Brantof Strasbourg(1458-1520), the famous author of The Ship of Fools (1494), who matriculated at Basle in 1475—the year after Reuchlin—and lectured there (latterly on law) from about 1480 to 1500. He was a pupil and friend of Heynlin, and he had in turn as a pupil Jakob Locher (1471-1528), sumamed Philomusus, who the Ship of Fools into Latin. Brant had some repute as a writer of Latin verse, but he was surpassed as a humanist by his pupil, who travelled in Italy, lectured at Freiburg and Ingolstadt, and edited the first German edition of Horace (1498).

In 1500 Brant left Basle to become clerk to the Council of his native city, Strasbourg. The appointment was made at the suggestion of the famous preacher, Johann Geiler of Kaisersberg (1445-1510), whose classical culture, patristic learning, and noble character not only made him the leading spirit in Strasbourg, but gave him a far-reaching influence.

From the Rhine we may pass eastward to the two greatest and wealthiest of the free cities, Augsburg and Nuremberg, in each of which there was a highly cultivated society ready to welcome every manifestation of the new movement. At Augsburg the leader of the humanist circle was Conrad Peutinger (1465-1547), who in his early years had gone through a long course of study in Italy and who, returning to his native town after 1490, was employed by the Emperor Maximilian on various embassies, but found leisure to promote learning in many ways. He encouraged historical research, founded a library, and especially devoted himself to the collection of coins and inscriptions. The map of the roads of the Roman Empire, known as the Tabula Peutingeriana, was bequeathed to him for publication by its discoverer, Conrad Celtes.

Chief of all the free imperial cities, and a centre not only of European trade but of all that was best in German culture, was Nuremberg. Its first humanist of distinction was Hartmann Schedel (1440-1514), who, after seven years at Leipzig, where he profited by the lectures of Peter Luder, and three years in Italy, where he studied medicine and copied inscriptions and the drawings of Ciriaco of Ancona, returned to his native town in 1466. Five years later came Regiomontanus, attracted by the fame of Nuremberg’s instrument-makers. He worked there till 1475. A later celebrity was Wilibald Pirkheimer (1470-1528), the friend of Diirer, whose house still stands in the Aegidien-Platz. He spent seven years in Italy and did not return to his native place till 1497, so that his chief activity as a humanist lies outside our limits. His wealth and his political experience gave him a wide influence and he formed an important library, partly of manuscripts, and partly of printed books which he had bought in Italy. Even its last relics, when they were finally dispersed by our Royal Society, contained such treasures as the Florence Homer and Greek Anthology, and the Aldine Aristotle, Aristophanes, and Euripides.

Nuremberg not only played a leading part in German humanism in the second half of the fifteenth century; it was also the capital of German art. But the churches, the domestic buildings, the sculptures, the woodwork, the metal-work, the stained glass, the painting, which form the glory of its golden age, were almost wholly medieval and national in their inspiration. In fact it was only towards the very close of our period that the great bronze-founder, Peter Vischer (1455-1529), and the great painter and engraver, Albert Durer (1471-1528), began to shew in their work the influence of the Italian Renaissance.

The Emperor Maximilian, to whose versatile if superficial intellect the German Renaissance owed not a little, was a friend of Pirkheimer and Peutinger and had close relations with both Augsburg and Nuremberg. But it is in connexion with Vienna and its university that he rendered the greatest assistance to humanism.

In 1450 the University of Vienna was one of the strongholds of scholasticism, but as early as 1454 the distinguished mathematician and astronomer, George von Peurbach (1423-61), who had spent three years in Italy and had lived in the house of the Cardinal of Cusa, began to lecture there on the Latin classics and continued his lectures for four years. In 1460 he was persuaded by Cardinal Bessarion to accompany him to Italy, where he died in the following year. The main object of his journey was the restoration with Bessarion’s help—for he himself did not know Greek—of the text of Ptolemy’s Almagest. His work was completed by his pupil, Johann Muller (1436-76) of Konigsberg, near Coburg, better known as Regiomontanus. Like Peurbach he lectured at Vienna on Latin poetry, but he left that city soon after his master’s death and spent seven years in Italy, perfecting himself in Greek and giving frequent lectures on astronomy and mathematics. At the height of his fame he settled, as we have seen, at Nuremberg and established there a flourishing school of mathematics and astronomy (1471-75). Among other activities he set up a printing press and printed the first edition of Manilius’ Astronomica. In 1475 Sixtus IV made him Bishop of Ratisbon and summoned him to Rome to help in the reform of the Calendar. But in the following year (1476) he died of the plague at the early age of 40.

After the departure of Regiomontanus from Vienna only occasional lectures on Latin classical authors were given in the faculty of arts. The university had now fallen on evil days, and, when the Emperor Frederick III died (1493), the number of its teachers and students had greatly dwindled. Almost Maximilian’s first act as Emperor was to reorganise his university and to divert it from scholasticism to humanism. In this work he was greatly helped by Celtes, whom, as we have seen, he summoned from Ingolstadt in 1497, but who had great difficulty in holding his ground against his scholastic opponents. It was in order to strengthen the humanist position that he transferred the headquarters of the Literary Society of the Danube from Buda to Vienna and that he instigated the Emperor to found the Collegium poetarum et mathematicorum. The latter, however, did not survive Celtes’ death in 1508.

The University of Ingolstadt, founded in 1472, showed from the first, under the impulsion of Lewis of Bavaria and his Chancellor, Martin Mair, a leaning towards humanism. But it was not till the advent of Celtes, first in 1492 as a private teacher, and then in 1494 as a regular professor, that the new studies began really to flourish. Celtes’ successor was Jakob Locher (1498-1503).

On the whole the German university which in its corporate capacity has the best record before 1500 in the matter of humanism is Erfurt. Peter Luder and a Florentine who called himself Jacobus Publicius Rufus lectured there in the sixties, Celtes in 1486. Agricola and Rudolf von Langen matriculated there in 1456, Dalberg in 1468. But the humanist to whom it owed most was Conrad Muth, better known as Mutianus Rufus (1471-1526). A student from 1486 to 1492, and afterwards a lecturer, he left for Italy in 1495 and did not return to Germany till 1502. In the following year he was appointed to a canonry at Gotha, where he made his house the gathering-place of Erfurt humanists and exercised an influence far outside his old university. But of his wide learning and his peculiar and unorthodox religious views (founded largely upon Florentine NeoPlatonism), which however did not preclude a strong attachment to the Catholic Church, it is not the place to speak here. Under his inspiration humanism flourished at Erfurt for the next fourteen years. Yet when he returned to Germany there was a student at Erfurt who was destined to give a wholly new direction to German humanism. The student was Martin Luther.

In the growth of German humanism during the fifteenth century the German printing press played an insignificant part. A small percentage of classical texts, among which Cicero’s ethical works, Seneca, and Horace greatly preponderated, Bruni’s translations of Aristotle, and some epistles and orations by other Italian humanists, make up the sum of its contribution to the movement. A few printers in the Rhenish towns like Fust and Schoeffer at Mayence, Zel and one or two others at Cologne, and Mentelin at Strasbourg, made a brave beginning, but they gave up the attempt in 1470, deterred by the fierce competition of the two Venetian presses of Jenson and Wendelin of Spires. It was not till the last decade of the century that a fresh start was made, notably by Koberger of Nuremberg, the biggest printer and publisher of his time, who printed in 1492 a Virgil with Servius’ Commentary, and by Grüninger of Strasbourg, who produced in 1498 the first German Horace, edited, as we have seen, by Jakob Locher. The Virgil can boast of a few sentences printed in Greek, but throughout the fifteenth century Greek type was so rare in Germany •as to be practically non-existent.

In Hungary the great soldier, John Hunyadi, had sufficient sympathy with humanism for Poggio to write to him and to send him copies of his works. But the founder of classical studies in that country was John Vitez (ob. 1472), Archbishop of Gran, who had continuous relations with the humanists of Florence and even persuaded some of them to visit his country. Moreover, through the agency of the Florentine bookseller, Vespasiano da Bisticci, who is eloquent in his praises, he formed an excellent library of Latin classical authors. He also promoted the study of Greek by sending young Hungarians at his expense to Italy. Among them was his nephew, Janus Pannonius (1434-72), who spent seven years in the house of Guarino at Ferrara and translated works of Demosthenes and Plutarch. He also acquired considerable fame as a writer of Latin verse and had, like his uncle, whom he predeceased in the same year, a good library.

The work of these two was continued by Matthias Corvinus (144390), who by inviting Italian artists and scholars to his court contributed to the general spread of the Renaissance. His library at Buda, in which he certainly incorporated some of Vitez’ books and probably also those of Pannonius, had a great and not undeserved reputation. On the Latin side it included most of the recent discoveries, while the Greek collection, though only seven of its manuscripts can be identified, was regarded as important by his contemporaries.

Casimir IV of Poland (1447-92) is credited with some taste for art and literature. In 1473 he appointed the Italian historian, Filippo Callimacho Esperiente, as he called himself—his real family name was Buonaccorsi—tutor to his children and later made him his secretary. In this post Callimacho obtained considerable influence, and he continued in favour under Casimir's successor, John Albert (1492-1501), until his death at Cracow in 1496. Another contributor to the spread of the Renaissance spirit in Poland was Conrad Celtes, who, as we have seen, lectured at Cracow for two years between 1487 and 1491. From 1482 to 1500 the number of matriculations in the university nearly quadrupled. We also hear of Celtes' activity in Bohemia, but during the long reign of Vladislav II (1471-1511) there was little sign of intellectual progress in that country, and the decline of the University of Prague, which had thrown in its lot with the Utraquists, was not arrested till the beginning of the sixteenth century. No less backward were the Scandinavian countries. All that there is to record is that a university was founded at Upsala by the regent, Sten Sture, in 1477, and one at Copenhagen in the following year. Of the six books printed at Stockholm in the fifteenth century and the four printed at Copenhagen none were of a humanistic character.

The restorer of classical studies in Spain was Antonio de Nebrija (14441522), better known as Nebrissensis, who after ten years passed in Italy returned to his native country in 1473 and filled the chair of Latin successively at Seville, Salamanca, and Alcali, touching and adorning a wide range of topics. His Spanish-Latin dictionary crowned his reputation as a scholar. In Greek scholarship he was surpassed by the Portuguese, Arias Barbosa (ob. 1530), who, like Nebrija, studied for many years in Italy, Politian being one of his teachers. In 1489 we find him at Salamanca, where he lectured on Greek for twenty years. Salamanca was at this time the leading university in Spain, but its fame was soon rivalled by that of Alcala, founded in 1499. Here Cardinal Ximenes conceived and carried to a triumphant conclusion the idea of his great Polyglot Bible. Another university, Valencia, was founded in 1500.

In Spain as in other countries Italian humanists helped to spread the movement. Prominent among them was the well-known Peter Martyr, who came to Spain in 1489 and found great favour with Isabella the Catholic. She encouraged him to open schools in various towns for young Catholic nobles and in 1492 had him appointed tutor to her son, Prince John. She herself was a fair Latin scholar and the new learning had in her a generous and enlightened patroness. Largely at her instance some half-a-dozen translations of classical authors formed a feature of the scanty contribution to humanism made by the Spanish press in the fifteenth century. About as many original classical texts were printed; it is curious to note that neither among these nor among the translations was there anything of Terence or Cicero or Horace.

In Spain, as in France, Renaissance art was heralded by the substitution of Italian influence for Spanish. But neither in architecture nor sculpture is there any Renaissance work by a native artist earlier than 1500. In painting, the work done at Avila by Pedro Berruguete from 1499 to his death in 1506 and a Pieta at Barcelona by Bartolome Vermejo, dated 1490, may be claimed as representing the transition.

Poggio’s visit to England, where he spent three and a half years, from the end of 1418 to the middle of 1422, in the service of Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, was a grievous disappointment to him. It brought neither preferment nor the discovery of fresh manuscripts. It has been said that his search for the latter was neither long nor exhaustive. It is true that in the larger libraries, such as Glastonbury, St Albans, Bury St Edmunds, Peterborough, Durham, Norwich, St Paul’s, and the two libraries of Christ Church and St Augustine’s at Canterbury, he could have seen more than “a few volumes of ancient authors,” but it is doubtful whether he would have found any important classical work that was unknown in Italy.

He might have fared better if he had made the acquaintance of his patron’s nephew, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (1391-1447), who, whatever his sins, must be regarded with gratitude as the restorer of classical learning in this country. He brought about this revival mainly by establishing relations between this country and Italy, where he became well-known as a scholar and a patron of scholars. At his suggestion Leonardo Bruni translated Aristotle’s Politics, and Pier Candido Decembrio dedicated to him his translation of Plato’s Republic. He also invited Italian humanists to England, among them Tito Livio Frulovisi, a schoolmaster at Venice and a writer of Latin comedies, whom he made his “poet and orator,” and who at his command wrote a Latin life of Henry V. His library, which was considerable for his day, bore witness to his humanistic tastes, and from it he made noble gifts, 129 volumes in 1435 and 1439,17 in 1441, and 135 in 1444 (N.S.), to the University of Oxford. Its fate after his death is not known, but it is a fair conjecture that it passed into the hands of his nephew, Henry VI, and that we have a record of part of it in the catalogue (made about 1452) of the original library of Henry’s college at Cambridge. But, except for about sixteen volumes, all these manuscripts have vanished, and only the inventories of them are left to tell their tale. Each collection contained an elementary Greek book and each a copy of Decembrio’s translation of the Republic. Bruni’s translation of the Politics went to Oxford, as did translations of a speech of Aeschines, of five of Plutarch’s Lives, and of the Cosmographia of Ptolemaeus. The Phaedrus of Plato, formerly in the library of King’s College, was doubtless the twelfth-century translation by Aristippus of Catania. Cicero was well represented in the gifts to Oxford, among his works being the recently discovered Epistolae ad familiares. The less common Latin authors included Apuleius, Varro’s De lingua latina, and Vitruvius. A noteworthy feature of the Oxford books was seven works of Petrarch, five of Boccaccio, and the Divina Commedia.

Among Duke Humphrey’s English protégés was Thomas Beckington (c. 1390-1465), who gave up his fellowship at New College to enter the duke’s service. He rose to be king’s secretary (1439) and Bishop of Bath and Wells (1443). His published correspondence shews that, as might be expected, he was a man of humanistic sympathies and that he cultivated relations with scholars who were closer in touch than himself with the centres of Italian humanism. His chief Italian correspondent was Flavio Biondo, proctor to Eugenius IV, who sent him a copy of his history of Italy. Among his English correspondents were Adam de Moleyns, Bishop of Chichester (ob. 1450), to whom Aeneas Sylvius wrote in 1444, praising his Latin style and dwelling on the debt which England owed to the Duke of Gloucester; and Andrew Holes (born c. 1395), Archdeacon of Wells and like Beckington a Wykehamist and a Fellow of New College, who, having been sent to Florence as envoy to Eugenius IV, remained in that city for a year and a half after the Pope’s departure, consorting with the leading humanists and collecting so many manuscripts that they had to be sent to England by sea. He was a client of Vespasiano da Bisticci, who has commemorated him in one of his charming and vivid biographical sketches.

A closer friend of Beckington than any of these, though a much younger man, was Thomas Chaundler (c. 1418-90), Dean of Hereford, who from about 1460 to 1475 was the most prominent figure in Oxford. His Latin style, though diffuse and without individuality, is correct and elegant. He also knew some Greek, and when Warden of New College (1455-75) appointed an Italian humanist, Cornelio Vitelli, to a Prae-lectorship. Though Vitelli was of no distinction as a scholar, he was competent to teach the rudiments of Greek, and he seems to have lectured at Oxford till 1488, when we find him at Paris.

William Grey, Bishop of Ely (ob. 1478), and John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester (1427-70), both Oxford men and both clients of Vespasiano, were in a sense Duke Humphrey’s successors. Grey seems to have resided in Italy from 1442, when he ceased to be Chancellor of Oxford, to 1454, when he was appointed to the see of Ely. After visiting Florence and Padua he settled at Ferrara to study Greek under Guarino. Thence he went to Rome as king’s proctor. In all these cities he collected manuscripts, of which 152 are still in the possession of his college, Balliol. Among them are numerous occasional writings by the chief Italian humanists, Petrarch’s Letters and Secretum, Bruni’s translations of the Ethics and Politics and that of the Timaeus by Gregorius Tifernas, Lactantius, and the Apology of Tertullian. John Tiptoft,  whose cruelties earned for him the title of the Butcher of England, was revered in Italy as a scholar and a patron. Like Grey, he visited the chief centres of humanism and spared no expense in collecting manuscripts. Unfortunately his collection, which he bequeathed to his university, never came into its possession. Another Balliol man who collected manuscripts and generally favoured the new studies was George Neville (c. 1433-76), brother of the kingmaker, Chancellor of Oxford, Lord Chancellor, and Archbishop of York (1465). We owe to Dr James the discovery that he employed a Greek scribe, Emmanuel of Constantinople, to make copies for him of classical and other Greek manuscripts. Emmanuel was one of four Greeks who made their way to England soon after the fall of Constantinople, the well-known scholar, Johannes Argyropoulos, being among them. He was also employed by Bishop Waynflete and he has altogether nine, or possibly ten, manuscripts in this country to his credit. Some years later—between 1489 and 1500—we find another Greek of Constantinople, John Serbopoulos, writing several Greek manuscripts at Reading Abbey.

The connexion between Balliol and Ferrara was kept up by John Free (c. 1430-65), who was sent to Italy at the expense of his patron, Bishop Grey, and by John Gunthorpe (o5. 1498). Both became good writers of Latin, and Free was even commissioned by some Italian friends to write an epitaph on Petrarch. He did not confine himself to classical learning, but studied law and medicine and taught the latter with such success that he acquired a large fortune. He accompanied Tiptoft to Rome, where the Pope formed so high an opinion of him that he appointed him to the see of Bath and Wells. But he died at Rome before consecration. John Gunthorpe, who held several ecclesiastical appointments, including the Deanery of Wells and the Wardenship of King’s Hall at Cambridge, collected manuscripts, many of which he bequeathed to Jesus College, Cambridge; but all these except about ten, dispersed over various Cambridge libraries—only three are of a humanistic character—have disappeared. The most interesting is a literal prose translation of the Odyssey, which he bought at Westminster in 1475 for a mark. The smaller collection of 38 manuscripts, which Robert Flemming (ob. 1483) presented in 1465 to his college of Lincoln, of which his uncle Richard Flemming was the founder, has fared better, for it remains in its original home. It includes six volumes of Cicero, one of which contains the Epistolae ad familiares, Traversari’s translation of Diogenes Laertius, and two works by Boccaccio. The same library also possesses a Greek manuscript of the Acts of the Apostles, St Paul’s Epistles, and the Catholic Epistles, which Flemming gave the college shortly before his death. He was made Dean of Lincoln in 1451, and, like his Balliol contemporaries, studied at Ferrara under Guarino. After visiting other Italian universities he settled at Rome, where he formed a friendship with Platina, the librarian of the Vatican. He was appointed a protonotary to Sixtus IV and dedicated to him a volume of Latin verse entitled Lucubrationes Tiburtinae.

Hitherto we have been concerned with collectors of manuscripts. John Shirwood (1431 or 1432-93), of University College, afterwards Bishop of Durham, whose first visit to Rome was made in 1474, seven years after the introduction of printing into that city, collected printed books. His Latin books were secured for the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford by its founder, Richard Fox, his successor in the see of Durham, and still remain there. The more recent rediscoveries are represented by Statius’ Silvae (Rome, 1475), the twenty extant plays of Plautus (Venice, 1472)— both editiones principes—Cicero’s speeches (Rome, 1471) and his De Oratore. Of Greek historians there are Polybius (five books) in Perotti’s translation (Rome, 1473), Dionysius of Halicarnassus in that of Lapo Birago (Treviso, 1480), and Plutarch’s Lives by various translators, edited by Gianantonio Campano, the friend of Pius II, and beautifully printed at Venice by Jenson in 1478. Landino’s Disputationes Carnaldunenses, Platina’s Lives of the Popes, and Alberti’s De re aedificatoria stand for Italian humanism. Architecture is also represented by a copy of Vitruvius. Shirwood had the reputation of being learned in Greek as well as Latin, but whatever Greek books he bought in Italy must have been manuscripts, and the only one that Dr Allen has been able to trace is Theodore Gaza’s Greek grammar, now in the University Library at Cambridge. Shirwood made many visits to Rome from 1474 to 1487, chiefly on matters of legal or diplomatic business. Thanks to his influential patron, Archbishop Neville, he held several ecclesiastical benefices, including a golden stall in York Cathedral, and after his patron’s fall he was employed on various duties by Edward IV, Richard III, and Henry VII.

Besides Shirwood there were other well-endowed ecclesiastics who proved themselves good friends to the new studies—for example, the two Bishops of Winchester, William of Waynflete (1395-1486), Provost of Eton and Lord Chancellor, who founded Magdalen College, Oxford in 1457, and Thomas Langton (o&. 1501), Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge and Provost of Queen’s College, Oxford; Thomas Millyng (ob. 1492), Prior of Westminster, and afterwards Bishop of Hereford, who, according to Leland, knew Greek; Richard Bere (pb. 1524), Abbot of Glastonbury; and the three friends of Erasmus—William Warham (c. 1450-1523) of Winchester and New College, who in 1504 became Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor; Christopher Urswyk (1448-1522), Henry VII’s confessor, who held successively the posts of Warden of King’s Hall, Cambridge, Dean of York, and Dean of Windsor; and St John Fisher (1459-1535), President of Queens’ College, Cambridge, and Bishop of Rochester, who brought Erasmus to Cambridge.

All these men were employed at one time or another on diplomatic missions, of which one especially calls for notice. It was the mission sent to Rome in 1487 (N.S.) to offer Henry VII’s obedience to the Pope. At its head was Bishop Millyng, and among its nine other members were Bishop Shirwood and William Tilley, Prior of Christ Church, Canterbury, who acted as “orator” and who was accompanied by a young Fellow of All Souls, named Thomas Linacre.

With Tilley and Linacre we enter on a new stage of the revival of learning in England. The earlier generation of Oxford humanists had been men of wealth and position. They had patronised scholars, both Italian and English; they had collected books and had given or bequeathed them to their colleges; some of them were men of scholarly attainments, and one or two had even known some Greek. But they were not teachers; they did not hand on the torch of learning. William Tilley (ob. 1494) of Selling (a village about six miles west of Canterbury) became a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury, about 1448. He was sent by his prior first to Canterbury Hall, Oxford, and then (in 1464) with a brother monk, William Hadley, to Italy, where he remained three years, learning Greek and collecting Greek and Latin manuscripts. In 1469 he again visited Italy, apparently on business connected with his monastery, and in 1472 he was elected prior. In 1490 he accompanied Bishop Fox on an embassy to Tours, and there made the acquaintance of Robert Gaguin, the leader of French humanism, who was one of the French plenipotentiaries. Like his predecessors, he collected manuscripts, but these alas! with few exceptions were destroyed by a fire just before the dissolution of the monasteries. He proved his Greek scholarship by translating a sermon of Chrysostom, and, greatest service of all, he introduced the regular teaching of Greek into his monastery.

His most distinguished pupil was Thomas Linacre (1460P-1524), a native of Canterbury, who, after continuing his studies at Canterbury Hall, became a Fellow of All Souls in 1484, and, as we have seen, accompanied Tilley to Rome in 1487, On his return journey he was left at Florence to sit at the feet of Politian and Chalcondylas. He remained twelve years in Italy, studying medicine and taking his M.D. at Padua (1496), and making friends at Venice with Aldus, the printer. For the latter he edited and translated Proclus On the Sphere—printed in 1499 in the Astronomies veteres—and he took part in the production of the great editio princeps of Aristotle (1495-98). In 1499 he returned to England, and about a year later was summoned to court and appointed tutor—at least nominally—to Prince Arthur. Another English scholar who helped Aldus with his Aristotle was William Grocyn (c- 1446-1519) of Winchester and New College. He became a Fellow of the latter in 1467, when Thomas Chaundler was Warden, and he probably learnt Greek from Vitelli. When he was over forty he joined Linacre at Florence and remained in Italy till 1491. Then he returned to Oxford, rented rooms in Exeter College, was appointed Divinity reader at Magdalen, and lectured daily on Greek. In 1496 he was appointed to the living of St Lawrence Jewry, and three years later took up his residence in London.

Grocyn was an Aristotelian; his friend John Colet (c. 1467-1519) studied Plato and Plotinus in Ficino’s Latin translations. He too travelled in Italy (1493-96) and learnt there the rudiments of Greek. On his return he resided in Oxford, of which university he was an M.A. His lectures on St Paul’s Epistles, in which he dwelt on St PauFs character and ethical teaching, attracted men of every standing in large numbers. It was mainly owing to his influence that Erasmus, who found him at Oxford in October 1499, took up the serious study of theology and made it his business to free it from the fetters of medieval dialectic. In 1504 Colet was appointed Dean of St Paul’s and joined his friends Grocyn and Linacre in London. When Erasmus, who now, thanks to his studies at Paris, had become a competent Greek scholar, paid his second visit to this country (1505), he declared “that in London there are five or six men who are sound scholars in both languages”. These would be Grocyn, Linacre, William Latimer (c. 1460-1555), a former Fellow of All Souls, who had just returned from Italy after a residence of six or seven years, William Lily (c. 1468-1522), who was to become High Master of St Paul’s School, and probably Cuthbert Tunstall (1474-1559), the future Bishop of Durham. Both the last two had studied in Italy before* 1500. Colet and Erasmus’ other chief friend, St Thomas More (1477 -1535), had only a smattering of Greek.

All these men, except More, took Orders, and More had at one lime a strong desire to follow their example. All, without exception, wore men of high character and principles, and three—Grocyn. Latimer, and Cole—were theologians as wed as scholars. This will help us to realise that in England as in France the Renaissance at the close of the fifteenth century had a profoundly serious and ethical bias, which turned it in the direction of theology and Church reform. But we must, not be misled by Erasmus’ enthusiasm into forming an exaggerated estimate of English humanism. In 1505 there may have been in this country five scholars who could not be surpassed, even in Italy, but they were all busy men, occupied with the work of their several professions. The teaching of Greek took no firmer hold in London than at Oxford. When Erasmus came to lecture at Cambridge, at the invitation of Fisher, in 1511, he chose for his text-books two grammars, and he soon abandoned his lectures altogether. When Richard Fox founded Corpus Christi at Oxford in 1516 with the view to provide a complete humanist education, the new college was greeted with a storm of opposition. It was not till 1519, when Richard Croke of King’s College was appointed Greek Reader in the University of Cambridge, that the teaching of Greek can be said to have been securely established in England.

Thus humanism in England during the fifteenth century was confined to a comparatively few individuals. Even after the introduction of printing students even more than in Germany had to depend on Italy for such books as they required. Terence and the Grammar of Sulpitius were the sole contribution of Wynkyn de Worde and Pynson to the new learning. No printer had enough Greek type to print a Greek quotation. No Greek book appeared till 1543.

We see from this account of the Renaissance in the countries on this side of the Alps that its positive results were practically limited to the field of Humanism. Here the advantage was with France, which was helped by having an effective centre of learning in Paris and two influential leaders in Fichet and Gaguin. But, as regards art, except for one or two doubtful instances, we can point to no work in France that can be claimed definitely for the Renaissance. But, as in other fields, the influence of Italy was making itself felt, and before long was to bear fruit that was not mere imitation, but in which native idiosyncrasies and traditions found an adequate expression. In vernacular literature on this side of the Alps there was even less sign of the Renaissance than in art. Jean Lemaire de Beiges, the earliest French writer who shews definite Renaissance characteristics, though he was twenty-seven in the year 1500, published no work of any importance till 1504. The memorable meeting between Boscan and Navagero at Granada which so deeply affected Spanish literature did not take place till 1526. In England Barclay and Skelton were both versed in classical literature and Skelton had an admiration for Cicero almost equal to Petrarch’s, but the poetry of neither shews in the slightest degree any trace of classical influence. In Germany there was no Renaissance literature before the seventeenth century; in its place they had a great national work—Luther’s Bible.