[Sidenote: Increased number of fugitives after 1453.] The impulse given to the study of Greek by exiles during the half-century, preceding the conquest of Constantinople and by the enthusiasm of a series of scholars from Petrarch and Boccaccio down to 1453, was greatly stimulated by the increase of fugitives consequent on the capture of the city. Among the scholars who made their way westward the best known are Lascaris, who rose to high distinction as a statesman, Callistos, Argyropulos, Gaza, and Chalcondylas. Between 1453 and the end of the century, Greek was studied with avidity. Youths learned to speak as well as to write it. [Sidenote: Renaissance _in excelsis_.] The arrival of numbers of scholars in Italy shortly before and shortly after 1453 is contemporaneous with the full springtime of the great revival of learning. A series of remarkable efforts had been made to restore ancient Roman and Greek glory as seen in literature and architecture. Learning was regarded as a new and improved evangel. The learning of the ancients was compared with the ignorance of the Churchmen. The new movement marked a great reaction and went to unjustifiable extremes. Some of the advocates for classical influence went to the extent of discarding Christian in favour of Pagan morality. A curious passionate enthusiasm for the classic and venerated past took possession of the most enlightened men in Italy. Paganism, because it was contemporaneous with the classical period, invaded the Church itself. All the architecture, art, and literature of Christianity was bad except in so far as it approximated to Pagan models. The late J. A. Symonds gives a striking illustration of the distance this enthusiasm carried men, in suggesting that Faust may be taken as the symbol of the desire during the Renaissance for classical learning. Faust is content to sell his soul to the devil, but in return he sees Homer and Alexander and obtains Helen as his bride and is satisfied.[551] The careful study of the Latin classics, the marvellous development of painting, architecture, and sculpture, but, above all, the keen interest felt in the newly developed study of Greek with its Platonic philosophy and its new vision of life, were all to produce wonderful fruit within a generation after 1453 and to culminate in Italy in an age of singular intellectual brilliancy. [Sidenote: Study of Greek taken up in Northern Europe.]