rhythm, shows itself in their poetry; and this imperfect knowledge of their once beautiful language is unfortunately too manifest in the grammars of the Greek exiles of the fifteenth century, which have so long been the groundwork of classical education in Europe. [229] An enumeration, and it is a long one, of the Greek books not wholly lost till this time will be found in Heeren, p. 125; and also in his Essai sur les Croisades. |Petrarch and Boccace learn Greek.| 15. We now come to the proper period of the restoration of Greek learning. In the year 1339, Barlaam, a Calabrian by birth, but long resident in Greece, and deemed one of the most learned men of that age, was entrusted by the emperor Cantacuzenus with a mission to Italy.[230] Petrarch, in 1342, as Tiraboschi fixes the time, endeavoured to learn Greek from him, but found the task too arduous, or rather, had not sufficient opportunity to go on with it.[231] Boccaccio, some years afterwards, succeeded better with the help of Leontius Pilatus, a Calabrian also by birth,[232] who made a prose translation of Homer for his use, and for whom he is said to have procured a public appointment as teacher of the Greek language at Florence, in 1361. He remained here about three years; but we read nothing of any other disciples; and the man himself was of too unsocial and forbidding a temper to conciliate them.[233] [230] Mehus. Tiraboschi, v. 398. De Sade, i. 406. Biog. Univ., Barlaam. [231] Incubueram alacri spe magnoque desiderio, sed peregrinan linguæ novitas et festina præceptoris absentia præciderunt propositum meum. It has been said, and probably with some truth, that Greek, or at least a sort of Greek, was preserved as a living language in Calabria; not because Greek colonies had once been settled in some cities, but because that part of Italy was not lost to the Byzantine empire till about three centuries before the time of Barlaam and Pilatus. They, however, had gone to a better source; and I should have great doubts as to the goodness of Calabrian Greek in the fourteenth century, which of course are not removed by the circumstance that in some places the church service was performed in that language. Heeren, I find, is of the same opinion, p. 287. [232] Many have taken Pilatus for a native of Thessalonica: even Hody has fallen into this mistake, but Petrarch’s letters show the contrary. [233] Hody. De Græcis Illustribus, p. 2. Mehus, 273. De Sade, iii. 625. Gibbon has erroneously supposed this translation to have been made by Boccace himself. |Few acquainted with the language in their time.|