Even men like Filelfo, whose restless pens produced no work of real importance, kept the intellectual life alert by their incessant activity. For the time the age found what it needed in such men, and scholars enjoyed the consideration awarded to poets under Augustus, rhetoricians in the later Roman Empire, jurists under Justinian, and the founders of religious orders in the days of St. Dominic and St. Francis. The deference shown to scholars is sufficiently attested by the honourable offices conferred upon them, the competition of princes and republics to obtain the most distinguished Latinists for their secretaries, and the throngs that attended their lectures and other public displays, vapid and empty as these frequently appear to us. The prevailing current of taste proved highly advantageous in raising the standard of university education. Bologna, in a former age the herald of Italian academic culture, latterly in a condition of decay, revived and asserted her supremacy, and her sister seats of learning competed vigorously with her and each other. The triumph of humanism seemed complete when in 1447 erudition made a Pope in the person of Nicholas V., the founder of the Vatican Library, whose love of erudition was such that it absolved in his eyes even Lorenzo Valla’s exposure of pious frauds. Two great events favourable to culture succeeded--the fall of Constantinople, which brought a fresh flight of learned Greeks into Europe; and the invention of printing, of which, however, Italy did not reap the benefit until 1464. The tardiness of so simple an invention, upon the verge of which antiquity had continually been hovering, is one of the most surprising facts in the history of the human mind; the indifference with which it was at first received is hardly less so; and the stimulus it imparted to literature long fell below reasonable expectation. It is remarkable, however, that two complete versions of the Bible appeared at Venice in 1471, and significant that no vernacular Bible was allowed to be printed anywhere else. The general character of the productions of the Italian press is distinctly academical and utilitarian. Classics and classical commentaries, theology, canon and civil law, medicine, form the staple; imaginative vernacular literature, even of the past, is scanty; contemporary literature might hardly have existed so far as the early records of the press indicate. Apart from the studies which conduced to a livelihood, the period all over Europe was one of intellectual barrenness. But young men of lively genius were growing up, and one of these was in a position to be as serviceable to modern belles-lettres as Nicholas V. had been to the study of antiquity.