The material world then seems to supply just those objects, whether birds, beasts, or flowers, by which the child is attracted, and on which his faculties will therefore be most naturally and healthily employed. But the Renascence schoolmasters had little notion of this. If you think that the greatest scholar is the greatest man, you will, as a matter of course, place at the other end of the scale those who are not scholars at all. An English inspector, who seems to have thought children had been created with due regard to the Revised Code of the Privy Council, spoke of the infants who could not be classed by their performances in “the three R’s” as “the fag end of the school;” and no doubt the Renascence schoolmasters considered the children the fag end of humanity. The great scholars were indeed far above the race of pedants; but the schoolmasters who adopted their ideal were not. And what is a pedant? “A man who has got rid of his brains to make room for his learning.”[7] The pedantic schoolmasters of the Renascence wished the mind of the pupil to be cleared of everything else, that it might have room for the languages of Greece and Rome. But what if the mind failed to take in its destined freight? In that case the schoolmasters had nothing else for it, and were content that it should go empty. II. RENASCENCE TENDENCIES. § 1. In considering and comparing the two great epochs of intellectual activity and change in modern times, viz., the sixteenth century and the nineteenth, we cannot but be struck with one fundamental difference between them. § 2. It will affect all our thoughts, as Sir Henry Maine has said, whether we place the Golden Age in the Past or in the Future. In the nineteenth century the “good time” is supposed to be “coming,” but in the sixteenth century all thinkers looked backwards. The great Italian scholars gazed with admiration and envy on the works of ancient Greece and Rome, and longed to restore the old languages, and as much as possible the old world, so that such works might be produced again. Many were suspected, not altogether perhaps without reason, of wishing to uproot Christianity itself,[8] that they might bring back the Golden Age of Pericles. § 3. At the same time another movement was going on, principally in Germany. Here too, men were endeavouring to throw off the immediate past in order to revive the remote past. The religious reformers, like the scholars, wished to restore a golden age, only a different age, not the age of the Antigone, but the age of the Apostles’ Creed. Thus it happened that the scholars and the reformers joined in attaching the very highest importance to the ancient languages. Through these languages, and, as they thought, through them alone, was it possible to get a glimpse into the bygone world in which their soul delighted.