Therefore the state in which the fifteenth century left Europe, as to religious matters, was this: an aristocratical reform had been attempted without success, and a popular reform had been broached and stifled, but was ever ready to explode. But the fermentation of the human mind was not confined at that epoch to the sphere of religious dogmas. It was in the course of the fourteenth century, as is well known, that the Greek and Roman antiquity was restored, so to speak, to Europe. The ardour with which Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and all their contemporaries, sought out Greek and Latin manuscripts, and gave them to the world, is matter of notoriety. The least discovery of that sort excited an amazing bustle and transport of joy. In the midst of this excitement, a school commenced to be formed, which has played a much more important part in the development of the human understanding than is ordinarily attributed to it; I mean the classical school. I do not attach to this word the meaning in which it is used at present; it was then concerned with anything but a literary system or contest. The classical school of that epoch was inflamed with admiration not only for the writings of the ancients, for Virgil and for Homer, but also for the whole ancient society--its institutions, opinions, and philosophy, as well as literature. It must be confessed that antiquity, under the heads of politics, philosophy, and literature, was far superior to the Europe of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is not, therefore, at all surprising that it exercised so great an influence, or that the majority of enlightened, active, refined, and fastidious minds conceived an utter disgust for the coarse manners, confused ideas, and barbarous forms of their own times, and gave themselves up with rapture to the study, and almost to the worship, of a society so much more regular, and at the same time so much more developed. Thus was originated that school of freethinkers which appeared at the commencement of the fifteenth century, and in which prelates, jurisconsults, and scholars were united together. {195}