Eastern travellers tell us of certain richly-irrigated soils in tropical lands, whereon the seeds that are cast spring up in a single night, covering, as if by magic, vasts plains, which before appeared barren wastes, with a mantle of tender green. Something like this was the rapid fertilisation exhibited in the world of letters after the death of Petrarch. More than a century, indeed, had to elapse before Italy could produce any names fit to compete with those of Dante, Petrarch, or Bocaccio; but the freshly-awakened enthusiasm for ancient learning, to which the writings of the two latter had so largely contributed, gave birth to a generation of scholars whose labours communicated a new direction to European studies. They did not leave behind them, as monuments of their genius, epic poems or philosophical discoveries, but they disinterred forgotten manuscripts, restored their corrupted texts, revived the study of Greek, and at the same time made known to Western Christendom the works of the great Greek authors by means of their own laborious Latin translations. They were, in short, a generation of grammarians, critics, and pedagogues, and were the instruments of achieving an intellectual revolution hardly less momentous than the religious and political revolutions which were to follow in after years. The watered soil and the fruitful seed did not fail to be cherished by the sun of princely favour. The fifteenth century was not more remarkable for its learned men, than for its noble patrons of learning. In Naples there was Alphonsus of Arragon, who, in the midst of his warlike campaigns, had the Commentaries of CÆsar read to him daily, and whose displeasure against the Florentine Republic was appeased by the timely present of a copy of Livy. When Gianozzo Manetti was sent to him as ambassador from Florence, and delivered At Ferrara, Nicholas of Este not only refounded the university of that city, but succeeded in gaining possession of two great teachers, Guarino the Elder, and John Aurispa, who directed the education of his son Lionel, and whose schools were frequented by students from every European land. Lionel repaid their care by himself becoming an elegant scholar, and establishing at his court an academy of poetry; and his brother Borso, who succeeded him, proved, perhaps, a yet more splendid patron of letters, though he had not himself received a learned education. A new poem of Leonardi, a map of the world, or a correct copy of Ptolemy’s geography, were treasures which won from Duke Borso many a golden florin for the scholar fortunate enough to present them; and the archives of Ferrara and Modena became crowded with decrees for the protection of scholars, which Tiraboschi assures us are no less remarkable for the elegant Latinity in which they are drawn up, than for the munificent spirit in which they are conceived. The Gonzaghi held rule at Mantua, and there an academy flourished under the princely patronage of the Marquis John Francis, concerning which I must speak a little more particularly, as its master in A no less passionate admirer of the ancient authors than his friend Guarino, who often assisted him in his school, Victorino was careful to guard his pupils from the paganising tendencies which he discerned in the spirit of the age. Along with the Greek and Latin classics, therefore, he presented to their study the Fathers of the Church, and the Divine Scriptures, and when lecturing on the heathen poets and historians, he was wont, in a few luminous words, to lay However, it must not be supposed that Victorino was a mere devotee, or that his school was of a retrograde class, excluding the new lights of classical literature. He was the friend and correspondent of all the scholars of his day, and the pupils of the “Casa Giojosa” were no whit behind their countrymen in classical acquirements. Ambrose Traversari, who was considered to equal Leonard of Arezzo as a Latinist, and to surpass him in his knowledge of Greek, has left an account, in his “Hodoeporicon” and in his epistles, While the smaller potentates of Italy were vying one with another in their encouragement of letters and learned men, the Sovereign Pontiffs were setting them the example on a yet more magnificent scale. From 1447 to 1455 the chair of St. Peter was filled by Nicholas V., who to extreme simplicity of manners united immense learning, and a mind capable of vast and magnificent designs. Whilst he was restoring peace to Italy putting an end to the schism which had sprung out of the Council of Basle, planning a fresh crusade, and laying plans for the rebuilding of Rome, on a plan realised only in the pages of Vasari, his agents were busy, all over the world, The accession to the pontifical chair of Eneas Sylvius Piccolomini, who became Pope in 1458, under the title of Pius II., seemed to promise much for the world of letters. He had already acquired a European fame as a poet and historian, and had received the laurel crown from the hands of Frederic III. But his short pontificate was almost entirely absorbed in preparations for the projected crusade, which he had resolved to undertake for the recovery of the Eastern Empire, and death alone prevented his carrying out his grand designs, and accompanying the army into the East in order to encourage the soldiers with his presence. Meanwhile a flood of Greek refugees poured into Europe, contributing very largely to encourage the restoration of ancient learning, though they certainly had not given the movement its first impulse. Even before the fall of Constantinople in 1453, many Greek scholars had judged it prudent to pass over into Italy in order to escape the ruin impending over their country. Others, again, had been attracted thither by the Council of Florence, held in 1441, for the extinction of the Greek schism. Among the latter was the celebrated Bessarion, Archbishop of Nice, who, convinced But neither Rome nor Naples was destined to be the Athens of modern Europe, but a city, still proud of her republican institutions, though on the point of surrendering all but the name of sovereignty into the hands of a successful family of merchant princes. Many circumstances had combined to render Florence the focus of the great literary movement then in progress, and thither chiefly resorted the exiled Greek scholars—such as Argyrophilus, George of Trebizond, Theodore of Gaza, and Gemistus. Schools had been opened in this city so early as 1393 by Emmanuel Chrysoloras, which may be said to have given the first impulse to the revival of Greek studies. Emmanuel came over to Italy, in the first instance, in the quality of ambassador from Constantinople, to seek for aid against the Turkish arms among the princes of the West. But he found it more to his taste, and possibly also to his profit, to exchange his diplomatic functions for those of a professor of letters, and soon reckoned among his disciples a group of scholars who were in their turn promoted to chairs of Greek rhetoric in the universities of Venice, Ferrara, Bologna, and Naples. One of these, Guarino, had been formerly acquainted with Chrysoloras at Constantinople, whither he had travelled in 1388 in search of manuscripts. Guarino was at that time only eighteen years of age, and after acquiring the Greek language, he set out on his return to Italy, bearing with him two great chests filled with the treasures which he had collected. A storm overtook the vessel, and in his dismay the captain ordered the Filelfo, on returning to Italy, first selected Bologna as the happy spot which was to be blessed with his erudite presence. He entered the city in a sort of triumph, the enthusiastic populace giving him the welcome ordinarily reserved for sovereign princes, and erecting a chair of Moral Philosophy and eloquence for his express occupation, with the handsome annual salary of 450 gold scudi. Every day saw some new festa invented to do honour to the great Professor and his charming “Chrysolorine,” as he somewhat affectedly designated his Greek spouse; and for a brief space Filelfo declared himself satisfied with the amount of homage offered to his genius. “Bologna is a charming city,” he writes in one of his epistles; “the inhabitants are courteous, and not insensible to letters; and what specially pleases me is the consideration and affection which they display towards me.” In 1428, however, a popular revolution dissipated all these pleasing prospects; Filelfo, in company with the Papal Legate, had to fly for his life, and while the cities of Italy scrambled which should obtain possession of so rare a scholar, the coveted prize fell to the share of Florence, where Cosmo de’ Medici and his rival, Philip Strozzi, were just then struggling which should outshine the other in acts of princely And it must be owned that Filelfo worked hard to gain their applause. The routine of his everyday work involved an amount of labour to voice and brain, under which any one but a professor of the fifteenth century must have succumbed. About daybreak he began by lecturing to a crowded audience on Cicero, Livy, or the Iliad. His explanations of Cicero were considered his greatest successes and by his ready and brilliant eloquence he seemed to reproduce the Roman orator to the eyes and ears of his hearers. Returning home, he gave audience to the favoured few who were happy enough to be on his list of private pupils; and at mid-day he was again in the public chair, commenting on Terence, or the Greek historians, Xenophon and Thucydides. Every evening there were literary reunions and learned academies to be attended, or private assemblies, in which Filelfo was, or, at any rate, considered himself to be, the great centre of attraction, and nurtured his good opinion of himself with the homage of an obsequious crowd. Even Sunday was no day of rest to him, for then, in the Church of Sta. Maria dei Fiori, he lectured and commented on Dante. The fascination of such a life, however, had a make-weight of mortification. Filelfo was possessed with one of those bitter and malignant dispositions that turn the very sweets of life into poison. His very jokes were malignant, as, when disputing with another grammarian on the quantity of a Greek syllable, he offered to pay him 200 scudi if he were proved wrong, on condition that, if right, he might have the satisfaction of shaving off his adversary’s beard. The poor grammarian lost his wager, and, in spite of all his entreaties, Filelfo gratified his revenge in the true spirit of a literary Shylock. It was quite enough for any other scholar to be praised and honoured for him to become at once the mark for Filelfo’s spite. “What does Guarino know, of which Filelfo is ignorant?” he exclaims in one of To his other vices Filelfo added that of a grasping avarice: he was continually appealing to the different princes of Italy for larger money advances, and loading them with abuse if they did not satisfy his demands. He threatened Pius II. to turn Turk, if the pension granted by that Pontiff were not more regularly paid; and his contemporary scholars continually complained that, after promising them books, he would afterwards withdraw from his bargain, and demand back again from them what was not really his own property. But, in candour, it must be confessed that, in this last-named matter, Filelfo appears to have been more sinned against than sinning. A very bad habit prevailed at that time among literary men of borrowing books and never returning them. Francesco Barbaro is accused of keeping a chest of Filelfo’s books for thirty years; and similar peccadilloes are charged to the account of Aurispa and Giustiniani. Whatever infamy attaches to the character of Filelfo, he met with his match in one of the literary rivals whom he encountered at Florence. Poggio Bracciolini had received his education in his native city, and to a perfect knowledge of Latin and Greek literature added the rarer merit of being a good Hebrew scholar. For thirty-four years of his life he held the office of apostolic secretary under successive Pontiffs, and during all that time he never spent an entire year in any one city. He was present in his official capacity at the Council of Constance, and to while away the hours that hung heavy on his hands, made an excursion to the neighbouring abbey of St. Gall, and disinterred from a damp tower the mouldering manuscript of Quinctilian’s “Institutes.” From thence he passed over to England to pursue his researches in the monastic libraries of this country, but declares that they were full of nothing but “modern doctors, whom we should not think worthy so much as to be heard.” By his discoveries of classic authors, and his own critical and historical writings, he contributed more than any other scholar of his time to the revival of learning, so that some writers have gone so far as to confer on the first half of the fifteenth century the title of “the age of Poggio.” But his glory was sadly clouded by the furious quarrels in which he engaged with all his contemporaries, and the foul and disgraceful language which he poured out against every one who was unhappy enough to come into collision with him. Among the works of this great champion of classic Latinity are four “Invectives” against Filelfo, and five against Lorenzo Valla. The latter were written in revenge for certain criticisms which Valla had published of his Epistles, and are, says Tiraboschi, “a disgraceful monument to the memory of a writer who observes neither rule nor measure, but defiles his pen with every hideous abomination which malice could suggest against his adversaries.” Valla, who was a scholar of precisely the same temper, replied in his “Antidotes to Poggio,” and Filelfo in his “Satires”—all of which are said to be conceived in the same rabid and malignant strain. Nor was it only against such men as these that Poggio directed his venom. Guarino was made the subject of another ferocious onslaught, for no worse misdemeanour than having differed from Poggio in preferring the It must be owned that the portrait gallery through which we are passing, has thus far been anything but pleasing, nor can it be denied that in their main features of malice and presumption, most of the scholars of the age exhibit a family resemblance to those noted above. Hallam observes that the inferior renown enjoyed by Giannozzo Manetti, is probably owing to the greater mildness of his character, which involved him in fewer of those altercations to which Poggio and Valla owed a great part of their celebrity. And Tiraboschi apologises to his readers for leaving some portions of his history somewhat obscure, on the ground that the calumnies and misrepresentations indulged in by almost all writers of the period, render it nearly impossible to rely on any of their statements, and to accept as facts anything which they may say unfavourable of one another. Some noble exceptions, however, are to be found, and among them may be quoted the example of Leonard Bruni, or, as he is more frequently styled from the place of his birth, Leonard Aretino. Whilst Chancellor of Florence he one day engaged in a public philosophic From the scholars of Florence let us now turn to her MecÆnas, the merchant prince, who, for thirty years, held the first rank in the Republic, and deserved to obtain from his grateful fellow citizens the title of “Father of his country.” Cosmo de’ Medici was beyond all question the greatest of his illustrious race. Machiavel calls him the most magnificent and most generous of men, and Flavio declares that he surpassed all his contemporaries in wisdom, humanity, and liberality. His political career seems to have been for the most part free from the vice of selfish ambition; whilst as a patron of letters, even in that age of splendid patrons, he had no equal. In Florence alone he founded three public libraries, expending 36,000 ducats on that of St. Mark’s, which he enriched with 400 Latin and Greek manuscripts, whilst he appointed as librarian Thomas di Sarzana, afterwards Pope Nicholas V. A few years later he rebuilt the library, and added a collection of Hebrew, Arabic, Sanscrit, and Chaldaic books, collected at enormous cost. His love of literature was so genuine, and so superior to the selfishness of a mere bibliopolist, that even when in temporary exile at Venice, he could not help opening his purse-strings in favour of the Venetian library of St. George, and employed his fellow exile, the architect Michelozzi, in providing it with reading benches and other conveniences, presenting it also with many books. It was his wish to draw to Florence all the learned men of the day. He it was who invited thither the It was in the year 1438, whilst Pope Eugenius IV. was residing at Florence, and the Council was still sitting which had for its object the extinction of the Greek schism, that a certain Greek, named George Gemistus, arrived in the city, and one day entered the palace of Cosmo with a copy of Plato under his arm. This celebrated scholar had received the surname of Pletho, in consequence of his enthusiastic admiration of the academic philosopher, and is more commonly known by this sobriquet than by his patronymic. Pletho, as we shall therefore call him, read a few pages of his book to the enraptured ears of Cosmo, and very soon communicated to him a portion of his own enthusiasm. Until then Cosmo had been a stranger to all save the Peripatetic philosophy, and the ideas which now presented themselves to his mind seemed like the opening of some new world. In his delight he conceived the plan of establishing a Platonic academy at Florence, a design which was put into execution without delay. Platonism, however, was then so new in the schools of the West, that Cosmo could find no professor who seemed capable of filling the chair of philosophy to be attached to this academy; and he resolved to educate for that purpose a child whose talents had already attracted his notice. Marsilius Ficinus was the son of his physician; his tiny frame and delicate constitution seemed incapable of making head against the host of maladies with which he had been beset from the cradle. But Cosmo’s quick eye With his customary bounty, he became a second father to his future professor, and under his direction, Ficinus received a thoroughly Platonic education. He was carefully reared in the maxims and philosophy of the great master, to the end that having early imbibed the principles of Platonism as a kind of second nature, he might be qualified afterwards to become the head preceptor of the new academy. The whole scheme had something visionary about it, and no less so was the character of the man chosen to carry it out. From his boyhood he was a poet and a dreamer. He loved to wander at early daybreak by the banks of the Arno, and recite aloud to the woods and the stream the verses of Virgil’s “Georgics.” Light and country air were his two necessaries; he seemed to live in the sunshine, and on those rare occasions when the fair sky of Florence was overspread with clouds, he could neither write nor study. His work as a composer was exclusively carried on in the early morning hours; then it was that his genius seemed to wake with the sunrise; and if he also spent long night hours over his manuscripts, he only then applied himself to the labour of revision. Cosmo gave him a little lamp, which was often found burning when daylight dawned in the east; he also provided him with books, and specially with manuscripts of Plato procured from Venice at an enormous cost, and to these Ficinus applied himself with such incessant application, that his health almost entirely gave way; in fact, his life seemed always hanging by a single thread, and was preserved only by such extraordinary precautions as are bestowed on some exotic plant. At the age of twenty-three, the young student considered himself ready to read to a learned assembly, presided over by Cosmo, the first pages of his “Platonic Institutions.” When the lecture was over, his patron smiled and gently shook his head. Ficinus understood the gesture, but was not discouraged; he prepared for a fresh course of studies, and placed himself under the historian Platina, more illustrious for his Greek erudition than for his orthodoxy, but the latter condition was not greatly cared for by the young Platonist. In a few months he found that he had made such rapid progress, that, remodelling his work, he submitted it to the judgment of Marcus Musurus, the Greek professor of Venice, and the first editor of Aristophanes. He found Musurus sitting “I think this,” said Musurus, and taking the ink bottle, he shook it over the open manuscript as if it had been sand. Ficinus betrayed no impatience, which is saying something for his philosophy; and retiring to the country house which Cosmo had presented to him, devoted himself to the task of a third revision. Before it was completed his great patron died leaving his son Pietro and his grandson Lorenzo de Medici to succeed him in his pre-eminence, both in the literary and political world. Pietro and Lorenzo showed themselves as eager to encourage the Platonic academy as its first founder had been; and their enthusiasm was shared by their contemporaries. All the scholars of Italy aspired to the honour of membership; Landino, Alberti, and John Picus of Mirandola, these met together, and contended for the silver laurel wreath, which was the prize of merit; and one of Pietro’s first acts was to establish a professorship, the chair of which was immediately bestowed on Ficinus. In the meetings of this academy the honours bestowed on Plato came very near to idolatry. Its festivals were the anniversaries of his birth and death, a lamp was burnt in his honour, and the professor, in lecturing to his fellow academicians, addressed them, not as “my brethren in Christ,” but as “my brethren in Plato.” It was, perhaps, unfortunate that Ficinus did not rest content with his professor’s chair and his academic reputation. In such a position his Platonic enthusiasm might have been productive of little injury, but at the age of forty-two he entered the priesthood, became canon of Florence, and took up the study of theology. Plato, however, was not laid aside for St. Paul. On whatever subject he wrote or spoke, says Tiraboschi, he seemed unable to refrain from tinging it with the doctrines of the academy. Gemistus, his first master, had been an avowed disciple of the Alexandrian school, and in the furious controversy then raging between the Platonists and the Aristotelians, had highly lauded not only the writings of the Greek philosopher, but those of Hermes and Zoroaster. In fact, as Hallam cautiously expresses it, “there were some grounds for ascribing to him a rejection of Christianity.” Ficinus cannot be charged with similar scepticism, though his lectures seem to have sown the seeds of religious doubt in the minds The extravagances in which Ficinus indulged were equally maintained in other learned academies. That which flourished at Rome under the direction of Pomponius Loetus drew on its members the hostility of Paul II., who has been repeatedly charged with “persecuting the learned,” out of that natural antipathy to learning, of which Popes and cardinals are sometimes imagined to possess a kind of monopoly. The historian who originated the charge, however, is no other than Platina, the former master of Ficinus, whom Paul II. had made an enemy by suppressing the college of the Abbreviatori to which he belonged. He was himself a member of the Roman academy, the suppression of which has been differently related by different historians, but it appears certain that the alleged crime of the members was, not their learning, but a real or supposed plot against the Government and certain impious and anti-Christian tenets which they were reported to hold. Tiraboschi considers that their innocence of the charges brought against them may be deduced from the fact that, after a year’s imprisonment, they were all set at liberty, and that Platina in particular was afterwards honourably employed by Sixtus IV., who made him librarian of the Vatican Library. Possibly the impieties of which they were guilty might rather have sprung from the foolish conceit of pedants than any positive unbelief; yet still it must be owned that some of their acts had a suspicious character, and could not but have appeared reprehensible in the eyes of the Pontiff. Michael Canensius declares they were wont to affirm We must not, however, suppose that the scholars of the Renaissance But the palm of Christian scholarship belongs, at this time, beyond all question, to John Picus, Prince of Mirandola, whose brief life closed in his thirty-second year, and whose acquirements probably surpassed those recorded of any other scholar. Whilst still a child he evinced so retentive a memory as to be able at once to repeat any verses recited in his presence, and displayed a sort of natural predisposition to the study of the belles-lettres. His mother, however, who wished him to embrace the ecclesiastical state, sent him to Bologna, to read canon law, at the age of fourteen, and after spending In his twenty-third year the young scholar appeared at Rome, and astonished the learned world by offering publicly to defend nine hundred theses on questions logical, ethical, mathematical, physical, metaphysical, theological, magical, and cabalistic; in short, de omni re scibili. Four hundred of these propositions were taken from Latin, Greek, Jewish, and Arabic doctors; the rest were announced to be his own opinions, which he was prepared to defend, subject to the judgment of the Church. There was a dash of vanity in all this, excusable perhaps in so young a scholar, who could not but be conscious of his superiority, and who in his anxiety to display it, offered to pay the expenses of any learned man who might come to oppose him from the utmost parts of the earth. His propositions were meanwhile examined by order of Innocent VIII., and thirteen of them pronounced unsound; whereupon he published an “Apology,” explaining in what sense they were put forth, but wholly submitting to the judgment passed on them by authority. The Holy Father, therefore, while condemning the theses, forbade their author to be in any way molested, and when some of his enemies revived these accusations on the death of Innocent, his successor, Alexander VI., appointed a commission, which declared his innocence of the charge of heresy. He next appeared at Florence, the most brilliant of all the brilliant throng that was gathered in the court of Lorenzo de’ Medici, and was admitted to the closest friendship of that prince, and his favourite scholars Ficinus and Politian. Young, gifted in mind and person, and possessed of all the fairy favours of rank, wealth, and an honourable fame, Picus of Mirandola yielded at first to the fascinations of the world, which perhaps never assumed a more bewitching guise than in the court of the Medici. His ardent poetic temperament was sensitively alive to the seductions of pleasure, when pleasure came hand in hand with all that was graceful in art and polished in literature. But a few years of such life sufficed to withdraw the veil from his eyes; the pursuit after worldly honours It is remarkable that Picus of Mirandola, though so thoroughly imbued with the literary tastes of the Renaissance, was very far from sharing in that contempt for the elder Christian schoolmen, in which the scholars of the fifteenth century commonly indulged. When Hermolaus Barbarus, in one of his letters, gave vent to his sentiments of scorn for men who could write such bad Latin, Picus replied in an epistle, which Hallam quotes as affording a favourable example of the ease and elegance of his own style, and in which he puts a very good defence in the mouth of those despised barbarians; and Hermolaus had nothing better to say in return than that they would certainly have disowned their advocate for defending them in such classical language. But we must now enter the school of another Florentine canon, who had the merit not only of being learned in Greek and Latin, but of possessing some of that original and poetic genius which, since the days of Petrarch, had been rare in Italy, overlaid, it may be, by the superincumbent weight of grammar learning. Angelo Politian had first made himself known to the world of letters by a graceful poem, composed when a mere youth on the occasion of a tournament, at which Julian and Lorenzo, the two sons of Pietro de’ Medici, appeared in the lists. The young poet, scarce fifteen years of age, was at once received into the Medici Palace, and astonished his tutors, Landino, Argyrophilus, and Ficinus, with his Latin epigrams. He was not much older when he undertook to translate Homer into Latin verse, and at twenty-nine we find him filling the chair of rhetoric at Florence, a distinction of which he was abundantly vain. Vanity was, in fact, his prevailing fault, and it raised him a swarm of enemies It was, in fact, the possession of that inexplicable gift, the poetic sensibility, which raised Politian to an eminence differing so very widely from that of the Poggios and Vallas who had preceded him, and which made him more charming as a lecturer, and perhaps more amiable as a man. Instead of wrangling over verbs and cases, he loved to picture to his own and his hearers’ imagination, the rural scenes which Virgil painted; and seizing some happy phrase of the All this was delightful enough, nor is it to be wondered at that the grace and fascination of such scenes blinded the eyes of those who took part in them, and the judgment of those who have been their historians. But, in truth, there was another side to the picture. The revival of classic taste at Florence was a revival of practical Paganism. It was not a mere return to those principles which had been admitted in the Christian schools before the rise of Scholasticism, when the Latin poets were freely studied even in ecclesiastical seminaries, and the Greek learning of the monks of St. Gall earned for some among them the title of the Frati Ellenici. It was a great deal more than this. It not only restored the study of the classic writers, but also their habits of thought, and their gross sensuality. It revived the Pagan, and excluded the Christian ideas; Christ was no longer recognised as “the One Teacher of man;” on the contrary, even from the pulpit you heard quotations from Virgil and Juvenal quite as often as from the Gospels. A style of speaking had become fashionable, according to which a certain sort of barbarism was associated with the idea of Christianity, as though it were something Gothic and transmontane. The Saints and Fathers of the Church gradually disappeared from the schools; the touching representations of Christian mysteries were withdrawn from the public eye; and society, instead of being permeated, as in former centuries, with an atmosphere of the faith, was now redolent of heathenism. Christianity was looked on as unworthy of furnishing subjects to the pen or pencil of the scholar. In those trellised gardens where the wits of Florence assembled to listen to the graceful eloquence of Politian, The books admitted as class-books into the new academies were precisely those authors which have been in all ages proscribed as the most dangerous, but which were now placed in the hands of the young without restriction of any sort. And, indeed, what kind of moral safeguards were likely to be supplied by professors such as Filelfo, Poggio, and Valla, whose licentious language was unhappily rather the rule than the exception among the teachers of the day? The study of the Scriptures, which in earlier times had filled so large a place in the scholastic course, was now all but entirely laid aside; and we are assured that some would even ask, with astonishing simplicity, what use could be derived from the knowledge of events that had happened so many ages ago? As to that liturgical element which had hitherto mingled so largely in the scheme of Christian education, it had little chance of being preserved in an age when not lay professors alone, but even ecclesiastics, were so besotted with their devotion to Pagan models, as to show themselves ashamed of the language of the Church formularies. Whilst some escaped from the misery of reciting their Latin breviaries by obtaining permission to use a Greek or Hebrew version, others gave up reading the Epistles of St. Paul through fear of accustoming their ears to so unclassical a style; and numerous proposals were set on foot for what was called a reform of the Liturgy, which should have for its object the correction of its style and its adaptation to classical forms. But even these were not the worst excesses. Tiraboschi assures us that scepticism and open unbelief were becoming frightfully common In other respects, also, the age of the Medici resembled but too closely that of Augustus. It was an age when a people were being cajoled to surrender their freedom into the hands of an absolute ruler, who used as his instrument for undermining republican institutions weapons far more deadly than the sword. Lorenzo had read Tacitus to some purpose, and thoroughly understood his maxim, that the easiest way to enslave a nation is first to corrupt it. He scrupled not to secure his political ascendancy in Florence by ministering to the baser passions of the populace. He amused them with shows and dances, carnival masquerades, and midnight processions, in which the flood-gates of license were freely opened, and heathen fables were represented in all their most unseemly crudeness; and in return they let him steal away their independence, and appropriate to himself the authority of the sovereign of Florence under the title of her First Citizen. Magnificent orgies were held by torchlight, wherein the triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne, or some other such subject, was enacted by bands of superbly-dressed masquers, singing those celebrated carnival songs composed by Lorenzo, which were, we are told, for the most part, immoral and indecent, expressing, not the graceful Platonism of a classical academy, but a mythological burlesque, flavoured for the grosser tastes of the populace. It was against this flood of iniquity in the schools, the palace, and the public streets, that the bold eloquence of Savonarola was at this time directed, creating a moral reaction, which proved, however fallacious in its brilliant promise of reform. Taking the Scriptures Savonarola had the satisfaction of effecting not a few conversions among the men of letters who gathered round his pulpit. Ficinus became his warm apologist, and after listening to his sermons declared his intention of devoting the rest of his life to religion. Nicholas of Schomberg and Zenobius Acciajoli abandoned the world, and assumed the Dominican habit. Picus Mirandola sold all his estates and distributed the price to the poor, and even Politian on his death-bed received the habit of religion from the hand of one of his friars. But whatever were the success gained by the preacher among the Florentine courtiers, his eloquence was powerless over the mind of their master. Lorenzo and Savonarola each tried to gain the other, and each was doomed to suffer defeat. Lorenzo vainly tried to The expulsion of the Medici from Florence in no way checked the progress of the classical Renaissance, which only attained its full growth in the following generation. To the age of Lorenzo the Magnificent succeeded that of his son Pope Leo X., under whose princely rule Rome drew to herself the literary throngs who had before illuminated the Tuscan court, and rejoiced in the questionable glories of a second Augustan age. But of Rome and her Pontiffs, her garish splendour and her true reform, we shall speak in another chapter. Before doing so we must first look across the Alps, and see what has been going on in the world of letters in the colder climate of the North. |