In 1453 Christendom was shocked by the news that the Turks had taken Constantinople. The home of learning and the citadel of philosophy was no more. The wisdom of Hellas, so it seemed to contemporary scholars like Æneas Sylvius, was destined likewise to perish. In fact, it was but beginning to be diffused. Scholars fled with what MSS. they could save to the hospitable shores of Italy. And at the very time that these fugitives were hastening across the Adriatic, it is probable that the sheets of the Mazarin Bible were issuing from the press at Maintz. Thus whilst Italy was rescuing from destruction the most valuable thought of the ancient world, Germany was devising the means for its diffusion in lands of which Strabo never heard, and to an extent of which the Sosii never dreamed. The Italians acquired the Greek language with rapidity and ardour. The student flung aside his scholastic culture; cast away the study of an Aristotle that had been conformed to Christian Theology, and the Sentences in which that theology was enshrined, and tried to identify himself in feeling with the spirit of cultivated paganism. The cowl and the gown were discarded for the tunic and the toga. But the New Learning did not make its way at once to England. And when at length the Englishmen who had travelled and studied in Italy brought back with them something of the generous enthusiasm with which they had been fired, their ideas were but coldly welcomed by the followers of Thomas or the disciples of Duns. At Oxford the New Movement took but a momentary hold of only a small part of the University, and then was shaken off by the massive inertness of the intellectual stagnation characteristic of the country. "They prefer their horses and their dogs to poets," wrote Poggio; "and like their horses and their dogs they shall perish and be forgotten." The majority of Englishmen are always slow to accept new ideas. They move ponderously and protestingly in the wake of the Continent. The New Learning was as unwelcome at Oxford as if it had been a motor car. The schoolmen were still busily chopping their logic, when the Medicis were ransacking the world for a new play, when Poggio was writing his "Facetiæ" or editing Tacitus, and Pope Nicholas was founding the Vatican Library at Rome. And the Renaissance, when it did begin to work in England, took the form of a religious reformation; the religious genius of the nation led it to the worship, not of Beauty, but of Truth. The English were equally late in adopting the new German art of printing. When Caxton introduced it, it had almost reached its perfection abroad. Block books--books printed wholly from carved blocks of wood--had come in and gone out. Arising out of them, the idea of movable types had long been invented and developed on the Continent.