exercise or sport. Youths were sent from several of the Italian Courts to be educated with the Mantuan princes. But Vittorino was resolved that the school should be open to any boy who was fitted to profit by it, and maintained at his own cost a large number of poor scholars, for whom lodgings were found near the villa. The rules of life and study were the same for all.
Vittorino's aim in education was to develope and train the whole nature of his pupil, intellectual, moral and physical; and to do this, not with a view to any special calling, but so as to form good citizens, useful members of society, men capable of bearing their part with credit in public and private life. This being his general aim, let us see how his methods differed from those which had prevailed in the middle ages, and in what sense they may be described as humanistic. In the pre-Renaissance schools for boys, the dominant influence was ecclesiastical. In teaching grammar and rhetoric, portions of the Latin classics were used; but the method of teaching them was encumbered with fantastic pedantry,—such, for instance, as the doctrine that a passage may have four meanings, literal, metaphorical, allegorical, and mystical,—which went far to annul their value and meaning as literature. For that value and that meaning an enthusiastic appreciation came in with the humanistic revival; to the humanist, the great writers of antiquity were living men, into whose mind and soul he was striving to penetrate by sympathetic study. That
