Through the instrumentality of art, and of all the ideas which art
introduced into daily life, the Renaissance wrought for the modern world
a real resurrection of the body, which, since the destruction of antique
civilization, had lain swathed up in hair-shirts and cerements within
the tomb of the mediæval cloister. It was scholarship which revealed to
men the wealth of their own minds, the dignity of human thought, the
value of human speculation, the importance of human life regarded as a
thing apart from religious rules and dogmas. During the Middle Ages a
few students had possessed the poems of Virgil and the prose of
Boethius--and Virgil at Mantua, Boethius at Pavia, had actually been
honored as saints--together with fragments of Lucan, Ovid, Statius,
Juvenal, Cicero, and Horace. The Renaissance opened to the whole reading
public the treasure-houses of Greek and Latin literature. At the same
time the Bible in its original tongues was rediscovered. Mines of
Oriental learning were laid bare for the students of the Jewish and
Arabic traditions. The Aryan and Semitic revelations were for the first
time subjected to something like a critical comparison. With unerring
instinct the men of the Renaissance named the voluminous subject-matter
of scholarship 'Litteræ Humaniores,'--the more human literature, or the
literature that humanizes.

There are three stages in the history of scholarship during the
Renaissance. The first is the age of passionate desire; Petrarch poring
over a Homer he could not understand, and Boccaccio in his maturity
learning Greek, in order that he might drink from the well-head of
poetic inspiration, are the heroes of this period. They inspired the
Italians with a thirst for antique culture. Next comes the age of
acquisition and of libraries. Nicholas V., who founded the Vatican
Library in 1453, Cosimo de Medici, who began the Medicean Collection a
little earlier, and Poggio Bracciolini, who ransacked all the cities and