Vittorino da Feltre, the great teacher of the beginning Renaissance, had during the first half of the fifteenth century a school at Mantua, where on the border of the lake he was teaching a group of noble youths and maidens according to the high ideals of education which he has so well laid down. Their course of study included Latin, Greek, philosophy, mathematics, grammar, logic, music, singing and dancing. Besides this, however, his scholars were taught "to live the simple life, to tell the truth and to remember that true scholarship was inseparable from virtue and a sense of lofty gratitude towards the Creator." As might have been expected from the Greek traditions of education, which were then attracting so much attention, the training of the body was not neglected and various outdoor games were insisted on so that there might be a healthy mind in a healthy body. Some of the traditions of that school at Mantua make very interesting reading and show how much some of the intervening periods in the history of education degenerated from those early days. For instance, we hear that not infrequently when Vittorino wanted to make a passage of Virgil impressive his scholars were taken out to Pietole, which has been identified as probably the village of Andes, in which, according to Donatus, Virgil was born, and here in the shady groves Virgil would be read and discussed and then there would be games and a return to the castle. While Vittorino was broad in his selections in the classic authors, and Virgil and Cicero and Homer and Demosthenes were read with explanations and then certain passages required to be learned by heart so as to form their style, he was no pedant and no friend of any exhibition of mere erudition. His most important bit of advice for his students was "First be sure that you have something to say, then say it simply." No wonder one of the D'Estes declared "that for virtue, learning and a rare and excellent way of teaching good manners, this master surpassed all others." {316} It would be easy to think that perhaps the young noblewomen of the time got but a very superficial knowledge of the classics, but we have a tradition of Cecilia Gonzaga, the daughter of the reigning house of Mantua and Vittorino's favorite pupil, that she could read Chrysostom at the age of eight and could write Greek with singular purity at the age of twelve. No wonder we hear of her later as the marvel of the age. Evidently all prejudice with regard to feminine education was at an end when Bembo said: "A girl ought to learn Latin, it puts the finishing touch to her charm." Sandys in his Harvard lectures on the Revival of Learning, has told the story of some of these young women scholars of Vittorino da Feltre and Guarino with some interesting details which show that success in scholarship did not prove an inflater of vanity in the young women of the time nor impair their religious spirit.