Symonds finds in the age of the Renaissance, or in what he calls the Humanistic movement, four principal periods: first, the age of inspiration and discovery, which is initiated by Petrarch; second, the period of arrangement and translation. During this period, the first great libraries came into existence, the study of Greek began in the principal universities, and the courts of Cosimo de’ Medici in Florence, Alfonso in Naples, and Nicholas in Rome, became centres of literary activity; third, the age of academies. This period succeeded the introduction of printing into Italy. Scholars and men of letters are now crystallising or organising themselves into cliques or schools, under the influence of which a more critical and exact standard of scholarship is arrived at, while there is a marked development in literary form and taste. Of the academies which came into existence, the most important were the Platonic in Florence, that of Pontanus in Naples, that of Pomponius Lætus in Rome, and that of Aldus Manutius in Venice. This period covered, it is to be noted, the introduction of printing into Italy (1464) and its rapid development. In the fourth period it may be said that scholasticism to some extent took the place of scholarship. It was the age of the purists, of whom Bembo was both the type and the dictator. There is a tendency to replace learning with an exaggerated attention to æsthetics and style. It was about the Court of Leo X. (1513-1522) that these æsthetic _literati_ were chiefly gathered. “Erudition, properly so-called,” says Symonds, “was now upon the point of being transplanted beyond the Alps.” The names of the scholars and writers who, following Dante, gave fame to Florence and to Italy, are part of the history of the world’s literature. It is necessary to refer here only to those whose influence was most important in widening the range of scholarly interests and in preparing Italy and Europe for the diffusion of literature, a preparation which, while emphasising the requirement for some means of multiplying books cheaply, secured for the printing-press, as soon as its work began, an assured and sufficient support. The fact that a period of exceptional intellectual activity and literary productiveness immediately preceded the invention, or at least the introduction of printing, must have had an enormous influence in furthering the speedy development and diffusion of the new art. The press of Aldus Manutius seems, as before said, like a natural and necessary outgrowth of the Renaissance.