‘Salvation’, ‘The City of God’--such words and phrases had been keys to the thought of the Middle Ages from St. Augustine to St. Dominic and St. Thomas Aquinas. To Renaissance minds there was but one master-word, ‘Humanity’. What message had these classical philosophers, that tradition held had lived in a golden age, for struggling humanity more than a thousand years later? The men and women of the Renaissance, as they put this question, hoped that the answers they discovered would agree with the Faith that the Church had taught them; but there was no longer the same insistence that they must or be disregarded as heresy. The interest in an immortal soul had become mingled with interest in what was human and transitory, with the beauty and charm of this life as well as with the glory of the next. Searching after beauty, no longer under the stern school-mistress ‘tradition’, but led by that will-o’-the-wisp ‘literary instinct’, the poets and authors under the influence of the Renaissance gradually turned from the use of Latin and Greek to that more natural medium of expression, their own language. This was the second aspect of the ‘New Learning’, the disappearance of the belief that Latin and Greek alone were literary, and the gradual linking up of mediaeval with modern scholarship by the discovery that the growth of national ideals and aspirations could best be expressed in a living national tongue. The forerunners of this movement lived long before the period that we usually call the Renaissance. Thus Dante, greatest of mediaeval minds, was inspired to employ his native Italian in his masterpiece, the _Divina Commedia_, that, had his genius been less original, might have been merely a classical imitation. Petrarch, the friend of Rienzi and lover of liberty, who lived at the papal court at Avignon, was half-ashamed of his Italian sonnets, yet it is by their charm still more than by his Latin letters that he lives to-day, as Boccaccio by the witty easy-flowing style of his tales. These are the names of literary ‘immortals’, and perhaps it may seem strange to find, when we pass from them to the ‘New Learning’ itself, that the greater part of the works published by members of the ‘Platonic Academy’ and other intellectual circles are now as dead as the dialectics of the schoolmen. Yet it is still harder, if we turn their pages, to believe that such florid sentences and long-drawn arguments could ever have stirred men’s blood to a frenzy of enthusiasm or passion. The explanation lies in the fact that for all the charm of its newly-won freedom, the Renaissance, on its literary side, was not a time of creation but of criticism and inquiry. Its leaders were too busy clearing away outworn traditions, collecting material for fresh thought, and laying literary foundations, to build themselves with any breadth of vision. Where they paused exhausted, or failed, the ‘giants’ of the modern world were able to erect their masterpieces.