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her kindly nurture developed in him that genius which has left the whole world his debtor. The hasty traveller, indeed, who stops for an hour or two on his way to Venice to take a hurried glance at the chapel of Giotto scarcely dreams as he treads the grass-grown streets of the deserted city,
‘Where wasteful time debateth with decay,’
how large a space Padua has filled in the intellectual life of Europe.[1] And yet it was once
- ↑ With reference to the state of the universities of Europe in the middle ages and Renaissance period, see Meiner’s ‘Historische Vergleichung der Sitten des Mittelalters, &c.,’ Hanover, 1793; 8 vo. vol. ii., 2ter Abschnitt, pp. 403–534; Cibrario, ‘Della Economia Politica del Medio Evo,’ Torino, 1842, vol. ii. pp. 308–312; and references; Tiraboschi, ‘Storia della Letteratura Italiana,’ Milano, 1826, 8 vo. iv. 61, v. 71, vi. 111, vii. 156, viii. 154; and the first three volumes of that storehouse of antiquarian knowledge, Monteil’s ‘Histoire des Français des divers États,’ of which the most convenient edition is that of 1853, with its graceful biography by Jules Janin.
As to Padua in particular, the best authorities are the, unfortunately, incomplete work of F. M. Colie’s, ‘Storia dello Studio di Padova,’ 4 vols. 4 to. Padova, 1824, 1825, which ceases at the year 1405, when the territory passed to the Venetian States, just at the time, in short, when so trustworthy a guide would have been beyond all price; next, the various details in Tiraboschi; Op. cit. iv.
