creed the spiritual aspirations of Aryan and of Semite. Italy was not a
pioneer in intellectual progress, nor a motive power in the evolution of
thought. The owl of the goddess of Wisdom traversed over the whole land
and found nowhere a resting-place. The dove, which is the bird of
Christ, flew straight to the city of Rome and the new reign began. It
was the fashion of early Italian painters to represent in mediaeval
costume the soldiers who watched over the tomb of Christ, and this, which
was the result of the frank anachronism of all true art, may serve to us
as an allegory. For it was in vain that the Middle Ages strove to guard
the buried spirit of progress. When the dawn of the Greek spirit arose,
the sepulchre was empty, the grave-clothes laid aside. Humanity had
risen from the dead.

The study of Greek, it has been well said, implies the birth of
criticism, comparison and research. At the opening of that education of
modern by ancient thought which we call the Renaissance, it was the words
of Aristotle which sent Columbus sailing to the New World, while a
fragment of Pythagorean astronomy set Copernicus thinking on that train
of reasoning which has revolutionised the whole position of our planet in
the universe. Then it was seen that the only meaning of progress is a
return to Greek modes of thought. The monkish hymns which obscured the
pages of Greek manuscripts were blotted out, the splendours of a new
method were unfolded to the world, and out of the melancholy sea of
mediaevalism rose the free spirit of man in all that splendour of glad
adolescence, when the bodily powers seem quickened by a new vitality,
when the eye sees more clearly than its wont and the mind apprehends what
was beforetime hidden from it. To herald the opening of the sixteenth
century, from the little Venetian printing press came forth all the great
authors of antiquity, each bearing on the title-page the words [Greek
text]; words which may serve to remind us with what wondrous prescience