But all these political dissensions sink quite into insignificance in comparison with the tremendous intellectual development of the time. As we have seen, the western world has been preparing for centuries for the development of an indigenous culture. Now the promise meets fruition. It required but the waft of a breeze from the East to fan the smouldering embers into flame. This vivifying influence came about partly through the emigration of large numbers of scholars from Constantinople; a migration incited chiefly by fear of the Turks. These scholars brought with them their love of the Greek classics and stimulated the nascent scholarship of Italy into a like enthusiasm. Soon there began and developed a great fashion of searching for classical manuscripts, and many half-forgotten authors were brought to light. It became the fashion to copy these manuscripts, as every gentleman’s house must now have a library. The revival of interest came about in time to save more than one classical author from oblivion, whose works would probably have perished utterly had they been subjected to another century of neglect. Such an author as Velleius Paterculus, for example, is known exclusively through a single manuscript, which obviously must have escaped destruction through mere chance; and everyone is aware how large a proportion of classical writers were not accorded even this measure of fortune. No doubt many authors were inadvertently allowed to perish even after this revival of interest, but the number must have been very small in proportion to those that were already lost. But the revival of interest in the works of antiquity was by no means the greatest literary feature of the time. There came with it a creative impulse which gave the world the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, not to mention the lesser chroniclers. Their work evidenced that spontaneous outbreak of the creative impulse for which the classicism of the East had been preparing. How spontaneous it was, how little understood, even by its originators, is illustrated in the fact that both Dante, the creator of Italian poetry, and Boccaccio, the creator of Italian prose, regarded their work in the vernacular as relatively unimportant; basing their hopes of immortality upon their archaic Latin treatises, which the world promptly forgot. No better illustration could be furnished anywhere of that spontaneity of truly creative art to which we have had occasion more than once to refer.