The occupation of disinterring manuscripts which had long been buried in dungeon-darkness, was carried on with an enthusiasm of which perhaps it would be difficult for us at this day to form an adequate conception. Many exhausted their fortunes in remote journeys, or in importations from the East; and the possession of a manuscript was considered not to have been too dearly purchased by the transfer of an estate, since only for the loan of one the pledge was nothing less.[4] The discovery of an author, perhaps heard of for the first time, was tantamount to the acquisition of a province; and when a complete copy of "Quintilian" was discovered, the news circulated throughout Europe. The rapture of collation, the restoration of a corrupt text, or the perpetual commentary, became the ambition of a life, even after the era of printing. This was the useful age of critical erudition. It furnished the studious with honours and avocations; but they were reserved only for themselves: it withdrew them from the cultivation of all vernacular literature. They courted not the popular voice when a professorial chair or a dignified secretaryship offered the only profit or honour the literary man contemplated. Accustomed to the finished compositions of the ancients, the scholar turned away from the rudeness of the maternal language. There was no other public opinion than what was gathered from the writings of the Few who wrote to the Few who read; they transcribed as sacred what authority had long established; their arguments were scholastic and metaphysical, for they held little other communication with the world, or among themselves, but through the restricted medium of their writings. This state was a heritage of ideas and of opinions, transmitted from age to age with little addition or diminution. Authority and quotation closed all argument, and filled vast volumes. University responded to university, and men of genius were following each other in the sheep-tracks of antiquity. Even to so late a period as the days of Erasmus, every Latin word was culled with a classical superstition; and a week of agony was exhausted on a page finely inlaid with a mosaic of phrases.[5] While this verbal generation flourished, some eminent scholars were but ridiculous apes of Cicero, and, in a cento of verses, empty echoes of Virgil. All native vigour died away in the coldness of imitation; and a similarity of thinking and of style deprived the writers of that raciness which the nations of Europe subsequently displayed when they cultivated their vernacular literature.