Latin literature, also, which had never ceased to be almost superstitiously
studied, took on a far greater human significance. Vergil and Cicero were
regarded no longer as mysterious prophets from a dimly imagined past, but
as real men of flesh and blood, speaking out of experiences remote in time
from the present but no less humanly real. The word 'human,' indeed, became
the chosen motto of the Renaissance scholars; 'humanists' was the title
which they applied to themselves as to men for whom 'nothing human was
without appeal.' New creative enthusiasm, also, and magnificent actual new
creation, followed the discovery of the old treasures, creation in
literature and all the arts; culminating particularly in the early
sixteenth century in the greatest group of painters whom any country has
ever seen, Lionardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo. In Italy, to be
sure, the light of the Renaissance had its palpable shadow; in breaking
away from the medieval bondage into the unhesitating enjoyment of all
pleasure, the humanists too often overleaped all restraints and plunged
into wild excess, often into mere sensuality. Hence the Italian Renaissance
is commonly called Pagan, and hence when young English nobles began to
travel to Italy to drink at the fountain head of the new inspiration
moralists at home protested with much reason against the ideas and habits
which many of them brought back with their new clothes and flaunted as
evidences of intellectual emancipation. History, however, shows no great
progressive movement unaccompanied by exaggerations and extravagances.

The Renaissance, penetrating northward, past first from Italy to France,
but as early as the middle of the fifteenth century English students were
frequenting the Italian universities. Soon the study of Greek was
introduced into England, also, first at Oxford; and it was cultivated with
such good results that when, early in the sixteenth century, the great
Dutch student and reformer, Erasmus, unable through poverty to reach Italy,
came to Oxford instead, he found there a group of accomplished scholars and