saint of the old Pagan world. In the eyes of those enthusiastic
worshipers, her beauty was beyond imagination or description: she was
far fairer than any woman of the modern age could hope to be. At last
Innocent VIII. feared lest the orthodox faith should suffer by this new
cult of a heathen corpse. Julia was buried secretly and at night by his
direction, and naught remained in the Capitol but her empty marble
coffin. The tale, as told by Infessura, is repeated in Matarazzo and in
Nantiporto with slight variations. One says that the girl's hair was
yellow, another that it was of the glossiest black. What foundation for
the legend may really have existed need not here be questioned. Let us
rather use the mythus as a parable of the ecstatic devotion which
prompted the men of that age to discover a form of unimaginable beauty
in the tomb of the classic world.[1]

[1] The most remarkable document regarding the body of Julia
which has yet been published is a Latin letter, written by
Bartholomæus Fontius to his friend Franciscus Saxethus,
minutely describing her, with details which appear to prove
that he had not only seen but handled the corpse. It is printed
in Janitschek, _Die Gesellschaft der R. in It._: Stuttgart,
1879, p. 120.

Then came the third age of scholarship--the age of the critics,
philologers, and printers. What had been collected by Poggio and Aurispa
had now to be explained by Ficino, Poliziano, and Erasmus. They began
their task by digesting and arranging the contents of the libraries.
There were then no short cuts to learning, no comprehensive lexicons, no
dictionaries of antiquities, no carefully prepared thesauri of mythology
and history. Each student had to hold in his brain the whole mass of
classical erudition. The text and the canon of Homer, Plato, Aristotle,