During this entire cycle, Florence was the great centre around which all elements gathered and were blended in an identity of character and influence. Under the Medici, the first Cosmo, and Lorenzo the Great, this fair city became the central seminary of elegant letters and profound erudition before the culminative excellence of art therein was reached under the auspices of Leo X. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries classical learning was highly esteemed, and a thorough acquaintance with it was an absolute necessity to any one with pretensions to learning. Tuscany soon revelled in a glorious native literature, one as fresh as when it grew on the rich soils of Rome and Greece. Its truths were everywhere received, as Bacon beautifully says, like "the breath and purer spirit of the earliest knowledge floating to us in tones made musical by Grecian flutes." Unlike the Augustan age of literature, the Leoine was not suffocated under the wealth it had plundered. If the knowledge of modern Europe had been otherwise compounded, it would have been neither so permanent nor effectual. Just enough of classic art and literature remained to facilitate and direct the growth of original excellence, and too little to destroy the characteristics of native worth. The materials of a former world were subordinated to a new structure, but both plan and elevation bore the aspect of a mightier spirit and more progressive race. To the Phœnicians, a nation of merchants, the ancient world was indebted for the invention of letters; and to the Florentines, a city of merchants, the modern world is indebted for the greatest literary improvements. As the commercial republics of Greece were the first to carry to perfection the arts of poetry, sculpture, and painting, the commercial republics of Italy and the Netherlands were the first to promote them at the revival, and to add new inventions to the ancient heritage. From the remains of Byzantine libraries, and the scriptoria of British and German monasteries, a merchant of Florence collected the long forgotten works of antique writers, and greatly enriched the first library of the West, by importations from Alexandria and Greece. A descendant of that merchant, in the same city, instituted a school for the study of antiquities; and, as the friend of Michael Angelo, was the munificent patron of learning and genius. A son of the latter followed in the same glorious career, and by his exertions in behalf of liberal culture, like Augustus and Pericles, gave his name to a brilliant age.