institutions and hostile to the spirit of prompt obedience.”
This servile devotion to Cicero, it should be recalled, was a marked departure from the more varied and richer curricula of the fifteenth-century humanists,[1] when men of the stamp of Vittorino da Feltre, Leonardo Bruni, Vergarius, Sylvius, and Guarino were the standard-bearers of humanism. Many causes bad conspired to bring about this decadence; and perhaps the most fundamental cause was the senseless worship of forms of expression. The later humanists worshipped the forms of thought. “Beauty of expression,” says Professor Laurie,[2] “was regarded as inseparable from truth and elevation of thought. The movement soon shared the fate of all enthusiasms. The new form was worshipped, and to it the spirit and substance were subordinated. Style became the supreme object of the educated classes, and successful imitation, and thereafter laborious criticism, became marks of the highest culture.”
This use of the classics as instruments in grammatical drill and vehicles of communication had become well-nigh universal by the middle of the sixteenth century, Erasmus, himself one of the most ardent advocates of classical learning, perceived apparently the narrowing tendencies of humanistic training, and urged that students be taught to know many things besides Latin and Greek in order that they might the
- ↑ See the admirable sketch of the earlier humanists: Vittorino da Feltre and other humanists. By William H. Woodward. Cambridge University Press, 1897. pp. 256.
- ↑ John Amos Comenius: his life and educational work. By S. S. Laurie. Boston: Willard Small, 1885. pp. 229.
