[Footnote 94: _De Remediis utriusque Fortunæ_, lib. i. dial. 43, p. 42. The passage condensed above is so valuable for a right understanding of the humanistic feeling about manuscripts that I shall transcribe portions of the original:--'Libri innumerabiles sunt mihi. Et errores innumeri, quidam ab impiis, alii ab indoctis editi. Illi quidem religioni ac pietati et divinis literis, hi naturæ ac justitiæ moribusque et liberalibus disciplinis seu historiæ rerumque gestarum fidei, omnes autem vero adversi; inque omnibus, et præsertim primis ubi majoribus agitur de rebus, et vera falsis immixta sunt, perdifficilis ac periculosa discretio est ... scriptorum inscitiæ inertiæque, corrumpenti omnia miscentique ... ignavissima ætas hæc culinæ solicita, literarum negligens, et coquos examinans non scriptores. Quisquis itaque pingere aliquid in membranis, manuque calamum versare didicerit, scriptor habebitur, doctrinæ omnis ignarus, expers ingenii, artis egens ... nunc confusis exemplaribus et exemplis, unum scribere polliciti, sic aliud scribunt ut quod ipse dictaveris, non agnoscas ... accedunt et scriptores nullâ frenati lege, nullo probati examine, nullo judicio electi; non fabris, non agricolis, non textoribus, non ulli fere artium tanta licentia est, cum sit in aliis leve periculum, in hâc grave; sine delectu tamen scribendum ruunt omnes, et cuncta vastantibus certa sunt pretia.'] The labour involved in the collection of classical manuscripts had to be performed by a few enthusiastic scholars, who received no help from the universities and their academical scribes, and who met with no sympathy in the monasteries they were bent on ransacking. The new culture demanded wholly new machinery; and new runners in the torch-race of civilisation sprang into existence. The high schools were contented with their summaries and glosses. The monks performed at best the work of earthworms, who unwittingly preserve fragments of Greek architecture from corrosion by heaping mounds of mould and rubbish round them. Meanwhile the humanists went forth with the instinct of explorers to release the captives and awake the dead. From the convent libraries of Italy, from the museums of Constantinople, from the abbeys of Germany and Switzerland and France, the slumbering spirits of the ancients had to be evoked. The chivalry of learning, banded together for this service, might be likened to Crusaders. As the Franks deemed themselves thrice blest if they returned with relics from Jerusalem, so these new Knights of the Holy Ghost, seeking not the sepulchre of a risen God, but the tombs wherein the genius of the ancient world awaited resurrection, felt holy transports when a brown, begrimed, and crabbed copy of some Greek or Latin author rewarded their patient quest. Days and nights they spent in carefully transcribing it, comparing their own MS. with the original, multiplying facsimiles, and sending them abroad with free hands to