determined the method of scholarship for the last three centuries in Europe. The lack of printed books in the first period of the Revival, and the comparative rarity of Greek erudition among students, combined with the intense enthusiasm aroused for the new gospel of the classics, gave special value to the personal teaching of these professors. They journeyed from city to city, attracted by promises of higher pay, and allured by ever-growing laurels of popular fame. Each large town established its public study, academy or university, similar institutions under varying designations, for the exposition of the literae humaniores. The humanists, or professors of that branch of knowledge, became a class of the highest dignity. They were found in the chanceries of the republics, in the papal curia, in the council chambers of princes, at the headquarters of condottieri, wherever business had to be transacted, speeches to be made and the work of secretaries to be performed. Furthermore, they undertook the charge of private education, opening schools which displaced the medieval system of instruction, and taking engagements as tutors in the families of despots, noblemen and wealthy merchants. The academy established by Vittorino da Feltre at Mantua under the protection of Gian Francesco Gonzaga for the training of pupils of both sexes, might be chosen as the type of this Italian method. His scholars, who were lodged in appropriate buildings, met daily to hear the master read and comment on the classics. They learned portions of the best authors by heart, exercised themselves in translation from one language to another, and practised composition in prose and verse. It was Vittorino’s care to see that, while their memories were duly stored with words and facts, their judgment should be formed by critical analysis, attention to style, and comparison of the authors of a decadent age with those who were acknowledged classics. During the hours of recreation suitable physical exercises, as fencing, riding and gymnastics, were conducted under qualified trainers. From this sketch it will be seen how closely the educational system which came into England during the reigns of the Tudors, and which has prevailed until the present time, was modelled upon the Italian type. English youths who spend their time at Eton between athletic sports and Latin verses, and who take an Ireland with a first class in “Greats” at Oxford, are pursuing the same course of physical and mental discipline as the princes of Gonzaga or Montefeltro in the 15th century.
The humanists effected a deeply penetrating change in social manners. Through their influence as tutors, professors, orators and courtiers, society was permeated by a fresh ideal of culture. To be a gentleman in Italy meant at this epoch to be a man acquainted with the rudiments at least of scholarship, refined in diction, capable of corresponding or of speaking Social manners. in choice phrases, open to the beauty of the arts, intelligently interested in archaeology, taking for his models of conduct the great men of antiquity rather than the saints of the church. He was also expected to prove himself an adept in physical exercises and in the courteous observances which survived from chivalry. The type is set before us by Castiglione in that book upon the courtier which went the round of Europe in the 16th century. It is further emphasized in a famous passage of the Orlando Innamorato where Boiardo compares the Italian ideal of an accomplished gentleman with the coarser type admired by nations of the north. To this point the awakened intelligence of the Renaissance, instructed by humanism, polished by the fine arts, expanding in genial conditions of diffused wealth, had brought the Italians at a period when the rest of Europe was comparatively barbarous.
This picture has undoubtedly a darker side. Humanism, in its revolt against the middle ages, was, as we have seen already, mundane, pagan, irreligious, positive. The Renaissance can, after all, be regarded only as a period of transition in which much of the good of the past was sacrificed while some of the evil was retained, and neither the bad nor theThe moral defects of the Italian Renaissance. good of the future was brought clearly into fact. Beneath the surface of brilliant social culture lurked gross appetites and savage passions, unrestrained by medieval piety, untutored by modern experience. Italian society exhibited) an almost unexampled spectacle of literary, artistic and courtly refinement crossed by brutalities of lust, treasons, poisonings, assassinations, violence. A succession of worldly pontiffs brought the church into flagrant discord with the principles of Christianity. Steeped in pagan learning, emulous of imitating the manners of the ancients, used to think and feel in harmony with Ovid and Theocritus, and at the same time rendered cynical by the corruption of papal Rome, the educated classes lost their grasp upon morality. Political honesty ceased almost to have a name in Italy. The Christian virtues were scorned by the foremost actors and the ablest thinkers of the time, while the antique virtues were themes for rhetoric rather than moving-springs of conduct. This is apparent to all students of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, the profoundest analysts of their age the bitterest satirists of its vices, but themselves infected with its incapacity for moral goodness. Not only were the Italians vitiated; but they had also become impotent for action and resistance. At the height of the Renaissance the five great powers in the peninsula formed a confederation of independent but mutually attractive and repellent states. Equilibrium was maintained by diplomacy, in which the humanists played a foremost part, casting a network of intrigue over the nation which helped in no small measure to stimulate intelligence and create a common medium of culture, but which accustomed statesmen to believe that everything could be achieved by wire-pulling. Wars were conducted on a showy system by means of mercenaries, who played a safe game in the field and developed a system of bloodless campaigns. Meanwhile the people grew up unused to arms. When Italy between the years 1494 and 1530 became the battlefield of French, German and Spanish forces, it was seen to what a point of helplessness the political, moral and, social conditions of the Renaissance had brought the nation.
It was needful to study at some length the main phenomena of the Renaissance in Italy, because the history of that phase of evolution in the other Western races turns almost entirely upon points in which they either adhered to or diverged from the type established there. Speaking broadly, what France, Germany, Spain andDiffusion of the new learning from Italy through-out Europe. England assimilated from Italy at this epoch was in the first place the new learning, as it was then called. This implied the new conception of human life, new interest in' the material universe, the new method of education, and the new manners, which we have seen to be inseparable from Italian humanism. Under these forms of intellectual enlightenment and polite culture the renascence of the human spirit had appeared in Italy, where it was more than elsewhere connected with the study of classical antiquity. But that audacious exploratory energy which formed the motive force of the Renaissance as distinguished from the Revival of Learning took, as we shall see, very different directions in the several nations who now were sending the flower of their youth to study at the feet of Italian rhetoricians.
The Renaissance ran its course in Italy with strange indifference to consequences. The five great powers, held in equilibrium by Lorenzo de’ Medici, dreamed that the peninsula could be maintained in statu quo by diplomacy. The church saw no danger in encouraging a pseudo-pagan ideal of life, violating its own principle of existence by assuming the policy of an aggrandizing secular state, and outraging Christendom openly by its acts and utterances. Society at large was hardly aware that an intellectual force of stupendous magnitude and incalculable explosive power had been created by the new learning. Why should not established institutions proceed upon the customary and convenient methods of routine, while the delights of existence were augmented, manners polished, arts developed, and a golden age of epicurean ease made decent by a state religion which no one cared to break with because no one was left to regard it seriously? This was the attitude of the Italians when the Renaissance, which they had initiated as a thing of beauty, began to operate as a thing of power beyond the Alps.
Germany was already provided with universities, seven of which had been founded between 1348 and 1409. In these haunts of learning the new studies took root after the year 1440, chiefly through the influence of travelling professors, Peter Luder and Samuel Karoch. German scholars made theirRevival of Learning in Germany. way to Lombard and Tuscan lecture-rooms, bringing back the methods of the humanists. Greek, Latin and Hebrew erudition soon found itself at home on Teutonic soil. Like Italian men of letters, these pioneers of humanism gave a classic turn to their patronymics; unfamiliar names, Crotus Rubeanus and Pierius Graecus, Capnion and Lupambulus Ganymedes, Oecolampadius and Melanchthon, resounded on the Rhine. A few of the German princes, among whom Maximilian, the prince cardinal Albert of Mainz, Frederick the Wise of Saxony, and Eberhard of Württemberg deserve mention, exercised a not insignificant influence on letters by the foundation of new, universities and the patronage of learned men. The cities of Strassburg, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Basel, became centres of learned coteries, which gathered round scholars like Wimpheling, Brant, Peutinger, Schedel, and Pirckheimer, artists like Dürer and Holbein, printers of the eminence of Froben. Academies in imitation of Italian institutions came into existence, the two most conspicuous, named after the Rhine and the Danube, holding their headquarters respectively at Heidelberg and Vienna. Crowned poets, of whom the most eminent was Conrad Celtes Protucius (Pickell), emulated the fame of Politian and Pontano. Yet, though the Renaissance was thus widely communicated to the centres of German intelligence, it displayed a different character from that which it assumed in Italy. Gothic art, which was indigenous in Germany, yielded but little to southern influences. Such
