"Florence was essentially the city of intelligence in modern times. Other nations have surpassed the Italians in their genius.... But nowhere else except at Athens has the whole population of a city been so permeated with ideas, so highly intellectual by nature, so keen in perception, so witty and so subtle, as at Florence. The fine and delicate spirit of the Italians existed in quintessence among the Florentines. And of this superiority not only they, but the inhabitants also of Rome and Lombardy and Naples were conscious.... The primacy of the Florentines in literature, the fine arts, law, scholarship, philosophy, and science was acknowledged throughout Italy" (Symonds). [Sidenote: The Renaissance, or _new birth_.] 120. The thirteenth century had been, as we have seen, a period of great enthusiasm for learning. The new universities attracted students from all parts of Europe, and famous thinkers like Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and Roger Bacon wrote great treatises on religion, science, and philosophy. The public delighted in the songs and romances composed and recited in the language of the people. The builders contrived a new and beautiful style of architecture, and, with the aid of the sculptors, produced buildings which have never since been surpassed and rarely equaled. Why, then, are the two succeeding centuries called the period of the _new birth_,--the Renaissance,--as if there was a sudden reawakening after a long sleep, as if Europe first began in the fourteenth century to turn to books and art? The word _renaissance_ was originally used by writers who had very little appreciation of the achievements of the thirteenth century. They imagined that there could have been no high degree of culture during a period when the Latin and Greek classics, which seemed so all-important to them, were not carefully studied. But it is now coming to be generally recognized that the thirteenth century had worthy intellectual and artistic ambitions, although they were different both from those of Greece and Rome and from our own. We cannot, therefore, conceive the "new birth" of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries quite as it was viewed by writers of a century ago, who failed to do justice to the preceding period. Nevertheless, about the middle of the fourteenth century, a very great and fundamental change did begin in thought and taste, in books, buildings, and pictures, and this change we may very well continue to call the _Renaissance_. We can best judge of its nature by considering the work of the two greatest men of the fourteenth century, Dante and Petrarch. [Sidenote: Dante, 1264-1321.]