Renaissance in Italy Volume II Part 16

The spirit of Roman literature lived again in Poliziano. If he cannot be compared with the Augustan authors, he will pa.s.s muster at least with the poets of the silver age. Neither Statius nor Ausonius produced more musical hexameters, or expressed their feeling for natural beauty in phrases marked with more spontaneous grace. Of his Greek elegiacs only a few specimens survive. These, in spite of certain licenses not justified by pure Greek prosody, might claim a place in the 'Anthology,' among the epigrams of Agathias and Paulus Silentiarius.[325] The Doric couplets on two beautiful boys, and the love sonnet to the youth Chrysocomus, read like extracts from the [Greek: Mousa paidike].[326] What is remarkable about the Greek and Latin poetry of Poliziano is that the flavour of the author's Italian style transpires in them. They are no mere imitations of the cla.s.sics.

The 'roseate fluency' of the 'Rime' reappears in these _prolusiones_, making it manifest that the three languages were used with equal facility, and that on each of them the poet set the seal of his own genius.

[Footnote 325: Julius Caesar Scaliger wrote thus about them in the _Hypercriticus_:--'Graecis vero, quae puerum se conscripsisse dicit, aetatem minus prudenter apposuit suam; tam enim bona sunt ut ne virum quidem Latina aeque bene scripsisse putem.']

[Footnote 326: _Quinque Ill.u.s.trium Poetarum Carmina_, pp. 299, 301.

These epigrams, as well as two on pp. 303, 307, are significant in their ill.u.s.tration of the poet's morality. Giovio's account of Poliziano's death was certainly accepted by contemporaries:--'_Ferunt eum ingenui adolescentis insano amore percitum facile in letalem morb.u.m incidisse._' The whole _Elogium_, however, is a covert libel, like many of Giovio's sketches.]

What has been said about his verse, applies with no less force to his prose composition. Poliziano wrote Latin, as though it were a living language, not culling phrases from Cicero or reproducing the periods of Livy, but trusting to his instinct and his ear, with the facility of conscious power. The humanism of the first and second periods attained to the freedom of fine art in Poliziano. Through him, as through a lens, the rays of previous culture were transmitted in a column of pure light. He realised what the Italians had been striving after--the new birth of antiquity in a living man of the modern world.

By way of modifying this high panegyric, it may be conceded that Poliziano had the defects of his qualities. Using Latin with the freedom of a master, he was not careful to purge his style of obsolete words and far-fetched phrases, or to maintain the diction of one period in each composition. His fluency betrayed him into verbiage, and his descriptions are often more diffuse than vigorous. Nor will he bear comparison with some more modern scholars on the point of accuracy. The merit, however, remains to him of having been the most copious and least slavish interpreter of the ancient to the modern world. His very imperfections, when judged by the standard of Bembo, place him above the purists, inasmuch as he possessed the power and courage to express himself in his own idiom, instead of treading cautiously in none but Ciceronian or Virgilian footprints.

As a professor, none of the humanists achieved more brilliant successes than Poliziano. Among his pupils could be numbered the chief students of Europe. Not to mention Italians, it will suffice to record the names of Reuchlin, Grocin, Linacre, and the Portuguese Tessiras, who carried each to his own country the culture they had gained in Florence. The first appearance of Poliziano in the lecture-room was not calculated to win admiration. Ill-formed, with eyes that had something of a squint in them, and a nose of disproportionate size, he seemed more fit to be a solitary scholar than the Orpheus of the cla.s.sic literature.[327] Yet no sooner had he opened his lips and begun to speak, with the exquisite and varied intonations of a singularly beautiful voice, than his listeners were chained to their seats. The ungainliness of the teacher was forgotten; charmed through their ears and their intellect, they eagerly drank in his eloquence, applauding the improvisations wherewith he ill.u.s.trated the spirit and intention of his authors, and silently absorbing the vast and well-ordered stores of knowledge he so prodigally scattered. It would not be profitable to narrate here at any length what is known about the topics of these lectures. Poliziano not only covered the whole ground of cla.s.sic literature during the years of his professors.h.i.+p, but also published the notes of courses upon Ovid, Suetonius, Statius, the younger Pliny, the writers of Augustan histories, and Quintilian.

Some of his best Latin poems were written by way of preface to the authors he explained in public. Virgil was celebrated in the 'Manto,'

and Homer in the 'Ambra;' the 'Rusticus' served as prelude to the 'Georgics,' while the 'Nutricia' formed an introduction to the study of ancient and modern poetry. Nor did he confine his attention to fine literature. The curious praelection in prose called 'Lamia' was intended as a prelude to the prior 'a.n.a.lytics' of Aristotle. Among his translations must be mentioned Epictetus, Herodian, Hippocrates, Galen, Plutarch's 'Eroticus,' and the 'Charmides' of Plato. His greatest achievement, however, was the edition of the 'Pandects' of Justinian from the famous MS. of which Florence had robbed Pisa, as the Pisans had previously taken it from Amalfi. It must not be forgotten that all these undertakings involved severe labours of correction and criticism. MSS. had to be compared and texts settled, when as yet the apparatus for this higher form of scholars.h.i.+p was miserably scanty. Though students before Poliziano had understood the necessity of collating codices, determining their relative ages, and tracing them, if possible, to their authoritative sources, he was the first to do this systematically and with judgment. To emendation he only had recourse when the text seemed hopeless. His work upon the 'Pandects' alone implies the expenditure of enormous toil.

[Footnote 327: 'Erat distortis saepe moribus, uti facie nequaquam ingenua et liberali ab enormi praesertim naso, subluscoque oculo perabsurda.' Giovio, _Elogia_. Cf. Poliziano's own verses to Mabilius, beginning:--

Quod nasum mihi, quod reflexa colla Demens objicis.

_Carmina Quinque Poetarum_, p. 277.]

The results of Poliziano's more fugitive studies, and some notes of conversations on literary topics with Lorenzo, were published in 1489 under the t.i.tle of 'Miscellanea.'[328] The form was borrowed from the 'Noctes Atticae' of Aulus Gellius; in matter this collection antic.i.p.ated the genial criticisms of Erasmus. The excitement caused by its appearance is vividly depicted in the following letter of Jacopus Antiquarius, secretary to the Duke of Milan:[329]--'Going lately, according to my custom, into one of the public offices, I found a number of the young clerks neglecting their prince's business, and lost in the study of a book which had been distributed in sheets among them. When I asked what new book had appeared, they answered, Politian's "Miscellanies." I mounted their desk, sat down among them, and began to read with equal eagerness. But, as I could not spend much time there, I sent at once to the bookseller's stall for a copy of the work.' By this time Poliziano's fame had eclipsed that of all his contemporaries. He corresponded familiarly with native and foreign princes, and held a kind of court at Florence among men of learning who came from all parts of Italy to converse with him. This popularity grew even burdensome, or at any rate he affected to find it so. 'Does a man want a motto for his sword's hilt or a posy for a ring,' he writes,[330] 'an inscription for his bedroom or a device for his plate, or even for his pots and pans, he runs like all the world to Politian. There is hardly a wall I have not besmeared, like a snail, with the effusions of my brain. One teazes me for catches and drinking-songs, another for a grave discourse, a third for a serenade, a fourth for a Carnival ballad.' In executing these commissions he is said to have shown great courtesy; nor did they probably cost him much trouble, for in all his work he was no less rapid than elegant. He boasted that he had dictated the translation of Herodian while walking up and down his room, within the s.p.a.ce of a day or two; and the chief fault of his verses is their fluency.

[Footnote 328: The first words of the dedication run as follows:--'c.u.m tibi superioribus diebus Laurenti Medices, nostra haec Miscellanea _inter equitandum_ recitaremus.']

[Footnote 329: _Angeli Politiani Epistolae_, lib. iii. ed. Ald. 1498.

The letter is dated Nov. 1488.]

[Footnote 330: In a letter to Hieronymus Donatus, dated Florence, May 1480, _Angeli Politiani Epistolae_, lib. ii.]

It still remains to speak of Poliziano's personal relations to the Medicean family. When he first entered the household of Lorenzo, he undertook the tuition of his patron's sons, and continued to superintend their education until their mother Clarice saw reason to mistrust his personal influence. There were, no doubt, many points in the great scholar's character that justified her thinking him unfit to be the constant companion of young men. Whatever may be the truth about the cause of his last illness, enough remains of his Greek and Italian verses to prove that his morality was lax, and his conception of life rather Pagan than Christian.[331] Clarice contrived that he should not remain under the same roof with her children; and though his friendly intercourse with the Medicean family continued uninterrupted, it would seem that after 1480 he only gave lessons in the cla.s.sics to his former pupils.

[Footnote 331: The well-known scandal about Poliziano's death is traceable to the _Elogia_ of Paulus Jovius--very suspicious authority.

See above, p. 252, note 2.]

Poliziano, proud as he was of his attainments, lacked the n.o.bler quality of self-respect. He condescended to flatter Lorenzo, and to beg for presents, in phrases that remind us of Filelfo's prosiest epigrams.[332] That a scholar should vaunt his own achievements[333]

and extol his patron to the skies, that he should ask for money and set off his panegyrics against payment, seemed not derogatory to a man of genius in the fifteenth century. Yet these habits of literary mendicancy and toad-eating proved a most pernicious influence. Italian literature never lost the superlatives and exaggerations imported by the humanists, and Pietro Aretino may be called the lineal descendant of Filelfo and Poliziano.

[Footnote 332: The most curious of these elegiac poems are given in _Carmina Quinque Ill.u.s.trium Poetarum_, p. 234. It is possible that their language ought not to be taken literally, and that they concealed a joke now lost.]

[Footnote 333: Poliziano's letter to Matthias Corvinus is a good example of his self-laudation.]

It must be allowed that to overpraise Lorenzo from a scholar's point of view would have been difficult, while the affection that bound the student to his patron was genuine. Poliziano, who watched Lorenzo in his last moments, described the scene of his death in a letter marked by touching sorrow which he addressed to Antiquari, and proved by the Latin monody which he composed and left unfinished, that grief for his dead master could inspire his muse with loftier strains than any expectation of future favours while he lived had done.

Two years after Lorenzo's death Poliziano died himself, dishonoured and suspected by the Piagnoni. Savonarola had swept the Carnival chariots and masks and gimcracks of Lorenzo's holiday reign into the dust-heap. Instead of _rispetti_ and _ballate_, the refrain of Misereres filled the city, and the Dominican's prophecy of blood and ruin drowned with its thundrous reverberations the scholarlike disquisitions of Greek professors. Poliziano's lament for Lorenzo was therefore, as it were, a prophecy of his own fate:

Quis dabit capiti meo Aquam? quis oculis meis Fontem lachrymarum dabit?

Ut nocte fleam, Ut luce fleam.

Sic turtur viduus solet, Sic cygnus moriens solet, Sic luscinia conqueri.

'Oh that my head were waters and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night! So mourns the widowed turtle dove; so mourns the dying swan; so mourns the nightingale.' Into these pa.s.sionate words of wailing, unique in the literature of humanism by their form alike and feeling, breaks the threnody of the abandoned scholar. 'Ah, woe! Ah, woe is me! O grief! O grief! Lightning hath struck our laurel tree, our laurel dear to all the Muses and the dances of the Nymphs, beneath whose spreading boughs the G.o.d of Song himself more sweetly harped and sang. Now all around is dumb; now all is mute, and there is none to hear. Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears!'

This at least of grace the G.o.ds allowed Poliziano, that he should die in the same year as his friend Pico della Mirandola, a few weeks before the deluge prophesied by Savonarola burst over Italy. Upon his tomb in S. Marco a burlesque epitaph was inscribed--

Politia.n.u.s in hoc tumulo jacet Angelus unum qui caput et linguas res nova tres habuit.

Obiit an. MCCCCLx.x.xXIV Sep. XXIV. aetatis XL.[334]

[Footnote 334: 'Poliziano lies in this grave, the angel who had one head and, what is new, three tongues. He died September 24, 1494, aged 40.']

Bembo, who succeeded him in the dictators.h.i.+p of Italian letters, composed a not unworthy elegy upon the man whom he justly apostrophised as 'Poliziano, master of the Ausonian lyre.'

The fortunes of Roman scholars.h.i.+p kept varying with the personal tastes of each successive Pope. Calixtus III. differed wholly from his predecessor, Nicholas V. Learned in theology and mediaeval science, he was dead to the interests of humanistic literature. Vespasiano a.s.sures us that, when he entered the Vatican library and saw its Greek and Latin authors in their red and silver bindings, instead of praising the munificence of Nicholas, he exclaimed, 'Vedi in che egli ha consumato la robba della Chiesa di Dio!'[335] aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini ranked high among the humanists. As an orator, courtier, state secretary, and man of letters, he shared the general qualities of the cla.s.s to which he belonged. While a fellow-student of Beccadelli at Siena, he freely enjoyed the pleasures of youth, and thought it no harm to compose novels in the style of Longus and Achilles Tatius. These stories, together with his familiar letters, histories, cosmographical treatises, rhetorical disquisitions, apophthegms, and commentaries, written in a fluent and picturesque Latin style, distinguished him for wit and talent from the merely laborious students of his age.[336] A change, however, came over him when he a.s.sumed the t.i.tle of Pius II. with the tiara.[337] Learning in Italy owed but little to his patronage, and though he strengthened the position of the humanists at Rome by founding the College of Abbreviators, he was more eager to defend Christendom against the Turk than to make his See the capital of culture. For this it would be narrow-minded to blame Pius. The experience of European politics had extended his view beyond the narrower circle of Italian interests; and there is something n.o.ble as well as piteous in his attempt to lead the forlorn hope of a cosmopolitan cause. Paul II. was chiefly famous for his persecution of the Roman Platonists;[338] and Sixtus IV., though he deserves to be remembered as the Pontiff who opened the Vatican library to the public, plays no prominent part in the history of scholars.h.i.+p. Tiraboschi may be consulted for his refusal to pay the professors of the Roman Sapienza. Of Innocent VIII. nothing need be said; nor will any student of history expect to find it recorded that Alexander VI. wasted money on the patronage of learning. To the Borgia, indeed, the world owes that curse of Catholicism, that continued crime of high treason against truth and liberal culture, the subjection of the press to ecclesiastical control.

[Footnote 335: 'Behold whereon he spent the substance of the Church of G.o.d!' Vespasiano adds that he gave away several hundred volumes to one of the cardinals, whose servants sold them for an old song. Vesp. p.

216. a.s.semani, the historian of the Vatican Library, on the contrary, a.s.serts that Calixtus spent 40,000 ducats on books. It is not likely, however, that Vespasiano was wholly in error about a matter he understood so well, and had so much at heart.]

[Footnote 336: See the Basle edition of his collected works, 1571.]

[Footnote 337: See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, p. 299.]

[Footnote 338: Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, pp. 302-303.]

Under these Popes humanism had to flourish, as it best could, in the society of private individuals. Accordingly, we find the Roman scholars forming among themselves academies and learned circles. Of these the most eminent took its name from its founder, Julius Pomponius Laetus. He was a b.a.s.t.a.r.d of the princely House of the Sanseverini, to whom, when he became famous and they were anxious for his friends.h.i.+p, he penned the celebrated epistle: '_Pomponius Laetus cognatis et propinquis suis salutem. Quod pet.i.tis fieri non potest.

Valete._'[339] Pomponius derived his scholars.h.i.+p from Valla, and devoted all his energies to Latin literature, refusing, it is even said, to learn Greek, lest it should distract him from his favourite studies. He made it the object of his most serious endeavours not only to restore a knowledge of the ancients, but also to a.s.similate his life and manners to their standard. Men praised in him a second Cato for sobriety of conduct, frugal diet, and rural industry. He tilled his own ground after the methods of Varro and Columella, went a-fis.h.i.+ng and a-fowling on holidays, and ate his sparing meal like a Roman Stoic beneath the spreading branches of an oak on the Campagna.

The grand mansions of the prelates had no attractions for him. He preferred his own modest house upon the Esquiline, his garden on the Quirinal. It was here that his favourite scholars conversed with him at leisure; and to these retreats of the philosopher came strangers of importance, eager to behold a Roman living in all points like an antique sage. The high school of Rome owed much to his indefatigable industry. Through a long series of years he lectured upon the chief Latin authors, examining their text with critical accuracy, and preparing new editions of their works. Before daybreak he would light his lantern, take his staff, and wend his way from the Esquiline to the lecture-room, where, however early the hour and however inclement the season, he was sure to find an overflowing audience. Yet it was not as a professor that Pomponius Laetus acquired his great celebrity, and left a lasting impress on the society of Rome. This he did by forming an academy for the avowed purpose of prosecuting the study of Latin antiquities and promoting the adoption of antique customs into modern life. The members a.s.sumed cla.s.sical names, exchanging their Italian patronymics for fancy t.i.tles like Callimachus Experiens, Asclepiades, Glaucus, Volscus, and Petrejus. They yearly kept the birthday feast of Rome, celebrating the Palilia with Pagan solemnities, playing comedies of Plautus, and striving to revive the humours of the old Atellan farces. Of this circle Ponta.n.u.s and Sannazzaro, Platina, Sabellicus and Molza, Ja.n.u.s Parrhasius, and the future Paul III. were proud to call themselves the members. It is only from the language in which such men refer to Laetus that we gain a due notion of his influence; for he left but little behind him as an author, and used himself to boast that, like Socrates and Christ, he hoped to be remembered through his pupils. In the year 1468 this Roman academy acquired fresh celebrity by the persecution of Paul II., who partly suspected a political object in its meetings, and partly resented the open heathenism of its leaders. I need not here repeat the tale of his crusade against the scholars. It is enough to mention that Laetus was imprisoned for a short while, and that in prison he wrote an apology for his life, defending himself against a charge of misplaced pa.s.sion for a young Venetian pupil, and professing the sincerity of his belief in Christianity. After his release from the Castle of S. Angelo he was obliged to discontinue the meetings of his academy, which were not resumed until the reign of Sixtus. Pomponius Laetus lived on into the Papacy of Alexander, and died in 1498 at the age of seventy. His corpse was crowned with a laurel wreath in the Church of Araceli. Forty bishops, together with the foreign amba.s.sadors in Rome and the representatives of the Borgia, who were specially deputed for that purpose, witnessed the ceremony and listened to the funeral oration. Laetus had desired that his body should be placed in a sarcophagus upon the Appian Way. This wish was not complied with. He was conveyed from Araceli to S. Salvatore in Lauro, and there buried like a Christian.

[Footnote 339: 'P.L. to his kinsmen and relatives, greeting. What you ask cannot be. Farewell.']

While the academy of Pomponius Laetus flourished at Rome, that of Naples was no less active under the presidency of Jovia.n.u.s Ponta.n.u.s.

It appears to have originated in social gatherings a.s.sembled by Beccadelli, and to have held its meetings in a building called after its founder the _Porticus Antonia.n.u.s_. When death had broken up the brilliant circle surrounding Alfonso the Magnanimous, Ponta.n.u.s a.s.sumed the leaders.h.i.+p of learned men in Naples, and gave the formality of a club to what had previously been a mere reunion of cultivated scholars. The members Latinised their names; many of them became better known by their a.s.sumed t.i.tles than by their Italian cognomens.

Sannazzaro, for instance, acquired a wide celebrity as Accius Syncerus. Ponta.n.u.s was himself a native of Cereto in the Spoletano.

Born in 1426, he settled in his early manhood at Naples, where Beccadelli introduced him to his royal patrons. During the reigns of Ferdinand I., Alfonso II., and Ferdinand II. Ponta.n.u.s held the post of secretary, tutor, and amba.s.sador, accompanying his masters on their military expeditions and negotiating their affairs at the Papal Court.

When Charles VIII. entered Naples as a conqueror, Ponta.n.u.s greeted him with a panegyrical oration, proving himself more courtly and self-seeking than loyal to the princes he had served so long.

Guicciardini observes that this act of ingrat.i.tude stained the fair fame of Ponta.n.u.s. Yet it may be pleaded in his defence that no moralist of the period had more boldly denounced the crimes and vices of Italian princes; and it is possible that Ponta.n.u.s really hoped Charles might inaugurate a better age for Naples.

He was distinguished among the scholars of his time for the purity of his Latin style; to him belongs the merit of having written verse that might compete with good models of antiquity. His hexameters on stars and meteors, called 'Urania,' won the enthusiastic praise of his own generation, and subsequently served as model to Fracastoro for his own didactic poem. His amatory elegiacs have an exuberance of colouring and sensuous force of phrase that seem peculiarly appropriate to the Bay of Naples, where they were inspired. As a prose-writer it is particularly by his moral treatises that Ponta.n.u.s deserves to be remembered. Unlike the ma.s.s of contemporary dialogues on ethical subjects, they abound in ill.u.s.trations drawn from recent history, so that even now they may be advantageously consulted by students anxious to gather characteristic details and to form a just opinion of Renaissance morality. Throughout his writings Ponta.n.u.s shows himself to have been an original and vigorous thinker, a complete master of Latin scholars.h.i.+p, unwilling to abide contented with bare imitation, and bent upon expressing the facts of modern life, the actualities of personal emotion, in a style of accurate Latinity. When he died in 1503, he left at Naples one of the most flouris.h.i.+ng schools of neopagan poets to be found in Italy; Lilius Gyraldus employs the old metaphor of the Trojan horse to describe the number and the vigour of the scholars who issued from it.

In the Church of Monte Oliveto at Naples there may be seen a group in terra cotta painted to imitate life. Alfonso II., Ponta.n.u.s, and Sannazzaro are kneeling in adoration before the body of the dead Christ. Ponta.n.u.s, who represents Nicodemus, is a stern, hard-featured, long-faced man, of powerful bone and fibrous sinews, built for serious labour in the study or the field. Sannazzaro, who stands for Joseph of Arimathea, is bald, fat-faced, with bushy eyebrows and a heavy cast of countenance. The physical characteristics of these men and their act of faith are in curious contradiction with the conception we form of them after reading the 'Elegies' and the 'Arcadia.'

The Roman Academy of Pomponius Laeetus and the Neapolitan Academy of Ponta.n.u.s continued to exist after the death of their founders, while similar inst.i.tutions sprang up in every town of Italy. To speak of these in detail would be quite impossible. With the commencement of the sixteenth century they lost their cla.s.sical character, and a.s.sumed fantastic Italian t.i.tles. Thus the Roman coterie of wits and scholars called itself _I Vignaiuoli_. The members, among whom were Berni, La Casa, Firenzuola, Mauro, Molza, a.s.sumed t.i.tles like _L'Agreste_, _Il Mosto_, _Il Cotogno_, and so forth. The Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici founded a club in Rome for the study of Vitruvius. It met twice in the week, and was known as _Le Virtu_. At Bologna the _Viridario_ devoted its energies to the correction of printed texts; the _Sitibondi_ studied law, the _Desti_ cultivated extinct chivalry. Besides these, the one town of Bologna produced _Sonnacchiosi_, _Oziosi_, _Desiosi_, _Storditi_, _Confusi_, _Politici_, _Instabili_, _Gelati_, _Umorosi_.

As the century advanced, academies multiplied in Italy, and their t.i.tles became more absurd. Ravenna had its _Informi_, Faenza its _Smarriti_, Macerata its _Catenati_, Fabriano its _Disuniti_, Perugia its _Insensati_, Urbino its _a.s.sorditi_, Naples its _Sereni_, _Ardenti_, and _Incogniti_--and so on _ad infinitum_. At Florence the Platonic Academy continued to flourish under the auspices of the Rucellai family, in whose gardens a.s.sembled the company described by Filippo de' Nerli,[340] until the year 1522, when it was suppressed on the occasion of the conspiracy against Giulio de' Medici. Duke Cosimo revived it under the name of the Florentine Academy in 1540, when its labours were wholly devoted to Petrarch and the Italian language. In 1572 appeared the famous academy called _Della Crusca_, the only one among these later societies which acquired an European reputation.

[Footnote 340: See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, p. 220, note.]

Those who are curious to follow the history of the academies, may be referred to the comprehensive notices of Tiraboschi. From the date of their Italianisation they cease to belong to the history of humanism; what justifies the mention of them here is the fact that they owed their first existence to the scholars of the third period. The worst faults of Italian erudition--pedantry and stylistic affectations--were perpetuated by coteries wors.h.i.+pping Petrarch and peddling with the idlest of all literary problems, where so great a writer as Annibale Caro thought it in good taste to write a dissertation on the nose of a president, and where the industry of sensible men was absorbed in the concoction of sonnets by the myriad and childish puns on their own t.i.tles. During the following age of political stagnation and ecclesiastical oppression the academies were the playthings of a nation fast degenerating into intellectual hebetude. Not without amazement do we read the eulogies p.r.o.nounced by Milton on the 'learned and affable meeting of frequent academies, and the procurement of wise and artful recitations, sweetened with eloquent and graceful incitements to the love and practice of justice, temperance, and fort.i.tude.' What he had observed with admiration in Italy, he would fain have seen imitated in England, undeterred apparently by the impotence and sterility of academic dissertations.[341]

[Footnote 341: See the _Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty_, and the _Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth_.]

It remains to speak of the establishment of printing in Italy, an event no less important for the preservation and diffusion of cla.s.sical learning than the previous discovery of MSS. had been indispensable for its revival. What has to be said about the erudite society of Venice may appropriately be introduced in this connection; while the final honours of the third period will be seen to belong of right to one of Italy's most n.o.ble-minded scholars, Aldus Manutius.