“The fifteenth century rediscovered antiquity; the sixteenth was absorbed in slowly deciphering it. In the fifteenth century ‘educated Europe’ is but a synonym for Italy. What literature there was north of the Alps was in great part derived from, or was largely dependent upon, the Italian movement. The fact that the movement originated in the Latin peninsula, was decisive of the character of the first age of classical learning (1400-1550). It was a revival of Latin as opposed to Greek literature. It is now well understood that the fall of Constantinople, though an influential incident of the movement, ranks for little among the causes of the Renaissance. What was revived in Italy in the fifteenth century was the interest of the Schools of the early Empire--of the second and third century.... But in one decisive feature, the literary sentiment of the fifteenth century was a reproduction of that of the Empire. It was rhetorical, not scientific. Latin literature as a whole is rhetorical.... The divorce of the literature of knowledge and the literature of form which characterised the epoch of decay under the early empire, characterised equally the epoch of revival in the Italy of the Popes.... The knowledge and wisdom buried in the Greek writers presented a striking contrast to the barren sophistic which formed the curriculum of the Latin schools. It became the task of the scholars of the second period of the classical revival to disinter this knowledge.... Philology had meant composition and verbal emendation; it now meant the apprehension of the ideas and usages of the ancient world. Scholars had exerted themselves to write, they now bent all their effort to know.... There came now into existence what has ever since been known as ‘learning,’ in the special sense of the term. The first period of humanism in which the words of the ancient authors had been studied, was thus the preparatory school for the humanism of the second period, in which the matter was the object of attention. As Italy had been the home of classical taste in the first period, France became the home of classical learning in the second. Single names can be mentioned, such as Victorius or Sigonius in Italy, Mursius or Vulcanius in the Low Countries, who were distinguished representatives of ‘learning,’ but in Bulæus, Turnebus, Lambrinus, Scaliger, Casaubon, and Saumaise, France produced a constellation of humanists whose fame justly eclipsed that of all their contemporaries.