The foregoing observations were requisite in order to explain why the cultivation of Latin poetry was no mere play-work to Italian scholars. The peculiar direction given by Petrarch to classical studies at the outset must also be taken into account. We have seen that he regarded rhetoric and poetry as the two chief aims of humanism. To be either a poet or an orator was the object of all students who had slaked their thirst at the Castalian springs of ancient learning. Philology and poetry, accordingly, went hand in hand through the periods of the Revival; and to this first impulse we are perhaps justified in tracing back the prominence assigned to Latin verse in our own school studies. Poetry being thus regarded as a necessary branch of scholarship, it followed that few men distinguished for their learning abstained from versification. Pedants who could do no more than make prosaic elegiacs scan, and scholars respectable for their acquirements, but destitute of inspiration, were reckoned among the _sacri vates_. It would be a weariful--nay, hopeless--task to pass all the Latin versifiers of the Renaissance in review. Their name is legion; even to count them would be the same as to number the stars--_ad una ad una annoverar le stelle_. It may be considered fortunate that perhaps the larger masses of their productions still remain in manuscript, partly because they preceded the age of printing, and partly, no doubt, because the good sense of the age rejected them. What has been printed, however, exceeds in bulk the 'Corpus Poetarum Latinorum,' and presents so many varieties that to deal with more than a selection is impossible.[413] [Footnote 413: I purpose in this chapter to use the _Delitiæ Poetarum Italorum_, two parts divided into 4 vols., 1608; _Carmina Quinque Illustrium Poetarum_, Bergomi, 1753; _Poemata Selecta Italorum_, Oxonii, 1808; and _Selecta Poemata Italorum_, accurante A. Pope, Londini, 1740.]