and the tragedians had to be decided. Greek type had to be struck.
Florence, Venice, Basle, Lyons, and Paris groaned with printing presses.
The Aldi, the Stephani, and Froben toiled by night and day, employing
scores of scholars, men of supreme devotion and of mighty brain, whose
work it was to ascertain the right reading of sentences, to accentuate,
to punctuate, to commit to the press, and to place beyond the reach of
monkish hatred or of envious time that everlasting solace of humanity
which exists in the classics. All subsequent achievements in the field
of scholarship sink into insignificance beside the labors of these men,
who needed genius, enthusiasm, and the sympathy of Europe for the
accomplishment of their titanic task. Virgil was printed in 1470, Homer
in 1488, Aristotle in 1498, Plato in 1513. They then became the
inalienable heritage of mankind. But what vigils, what anxious
expenditure of thought, what agonies of doubt and expectation, were
endured by those heroes of humanizing scholarship, whom we are apt to
think of merely as pedants! Which of us now warms and thrills with
emotion at hearing the name of Aldus Manutius, or of Henricus Stephanus,
or of Johannes Froben? Yet this we surely ought to do; for to them we
owe in a great measure the freedom of our spirit, our stores of
intellectual enjoyment, our command of the past, our certainty of the
future of human culture.

This third age in the history of the Renaissance Scholarship may be said
to have reached its climax in Erasmus; for by this time Italy had handed
on the torch of learning to the northern nations. The publication of his
"Adagia" in 1500, marks the advent of a more critical and selective
spirit, which from that date onward has been gradually gaining strength
in the modern mind. Criticism, in the true sense of accurate testing and
sifting, is one of the points which distinguish the moderns from the
ancients; and criticism was developed by the process of assimilation,