Through the instrumentality of art, and of all the ideas which art introduced into daily life, the Renaissance wrought for the modern world a real resurrection of the body which, since the destruction of the pagan civilization, had lain swathed up in hair-shirts and cerements within the tomb of the mediaeval cloister. It was scholarship which revealed to men the wealth of their own minds, the dignity of human thought, the value of human speculation, the importance of human life regarded as a thing apart from religious rules and dogmas. During the Middle Ages a few students had possessed the poems of Vergil and the prose of Boethius--and Vergil at Mantua, Boethius at Pavia, had actually been honored as saints--together with fragments of Lucan, Ovid, Statius, Cicero, and Horace. The Renaissance opened to the whole reading public the treasure-houses of Greek and Latin literature. At the same time the Bible, in its original tongues, was rediscovered. Mines of oriental learning were laid bare for the students of the Jewish and Arabic traditions. What we may call the Aryan and the Semitic revelations were for the first time subjected to something like a critical comparison. With unerring instinct the men of the Renaissance named the voluminous subject-matter of scholarship _Litterae Humaniores_ ("the more human literature"), the literature that humanizes. There are three stages in the history of scholarship during the Renaissance. The first is the age of passionate desire. Petrarch poring over a Homer he could not understand, and Boccaccio in his maturity learning Greek, in order that he might drink from the well-head of poetic inspiration, are the heroes of this period. They inspired the Italians with a thirst for antique culture. Next comes the age of acquisition and of libraries. Nicholas V, who founded the Vatican Library in 1453, Cosmo de' Medici, who began the Medicean collection a little earlier, and Poggio Bracciolini, who ransacked all the cities and convents of Europe for manuscripts, together with the teachers of Greek, who in the first half of the fifteenth century escaped from Constantinople with precious freights of classic literature, are the heroes of this second period. It was an age of accumulation, of uncritical and indiscriminate enthusiasm. Manuscripts were worshipped by these men, just as the reliques of the Holy Land had been adored by their great-grandfathers. The eagerness of the crusades was revived in this quest of the holy grail of ancient knowledge. Waifs and strays of pagan authors were valued like precious gems, revelled in like odoriferous and gorgeous flowers, consulted like oracles of God, gazed on like the eyes of a beloved mistress. The good, the bad, and the indifferent received an almost equal homage. Criticism had not yet begun. The world was bent on gathering up its treasures, frantically bewailing the lost books of Livy, the lost songs of Sappho--absorbing to