If we ask why Italy did not continue to be the centre of the humanist movement, which she had so brilliantly inaugurated, the answer is that the intelligence was crushed by the reviviscence of ecclesiastical ideas. Learning is the result of research, and research must be free and cannot coexist with the claim of the Catholic clergy to be superior to enquiry. The French school, it will be observed, is wholly in fact or in intention Protestant. As soon as it was decided (as it was before 1600) that France was to be a Catholic country, and the University of Paris a Catholic university, learning was extinguished in France. France saw without regret and without repentance the expatriation of her unrivalled scholars. With Scaliger and Saumaise, the seat of learning was transferred from France to Holland. The third period of classical learning thus coincides with the Dutch school. From 1593, the date of Scaliger’s removal to Leyden, the supremacy in the republic of learning was possessed by the Dutch. In the course of the eighteenth century, the Dutch school was gradually supplanted by the North German, which from that time forward has taken, and still possesses, the lead in philological science.”[420] [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER II. THE INVENTION OF PRINTING AND THE WORK OF THE FIRST PRINTERS OF HOLLAND AND GERMANY. 1440-1528. “FOUR men, Gutenberg, Columbus, Luther, and Copernicus, stand at the dividing line of the Middle Ages, and serve as boundary stones marking the entrance of mankind into a higher and finer epoch of its development.”[421]