DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.63221#0061
CHAPTER III
I
THE SCHOLARS OF THE RENAISSANCE
The Scholars of the Renaissance fill a unique position.
Never before or since has scholarship occupied the place it
did at that time. It was a newly-found country in which
each man was discovering and exploring for himself, un-
trammelled by the etiquette of the Schools—working by the
light of morning, after long groping amid the shadows of
scholasticism. Clearness had not stiffened into pedantry,
discussion had not crystallized into rules; it was still a keen
quest after truth, undertaken by no dust-stained wayfarers,
but by strong hopeful men in the fulness of their youth.
They did not seek a goddess of cold pure marble, but a living
mistress—an intense romance: the romance lay uppermost
for them. Erasmus could never get through the chapters
on old Age and Friendship in his Cicero without pausing
to kiss the page. “Many truly are to be ranked among
the Saints,” he writes, “who do not find a place in our
lists of them.” Classical style was then—as it still is in a few
individuals—a sixth sense, an aesthetic appetite. There was
a poet of the time who every year burned a copy of Mar-
tial as a sacrifice to Catullus—the object of his worship.
Another man of letters—a great Scholar—stretched on a
I
THE SCHOLARS OF THE RENAISSANCE
The Scholars of the Renaissance fill a unique position.
Never before or since has scholarship occupied the place it
did at that time. It was a newly-found country in which
each man was discovering and exploring for himself, un-
trammelled by the etiquette of the Schools—working by the
light of morning, after long groping amid the shadows of
scholasticism. Clearness had not stiffened into pedantry,
discussion had not crystallized into rules; it was still a keen
quest after truth, undertaken by no dust-stained wayfarers,
but by strong hopeful men in the fulness of their youth.
They did not seek a goddess of cold pure marble, but a living
mistress—an intense romance: the romance lay uppermost
for them. Erasmus could never get through the chapters
on old Age and Friendship in his Cicero without pausing
to kiss the page. “Many truly are to be ranked among
the Saints,” he writes, “who do not find a place in our
lists of them.” Classical style was then—as it still is in a few
individuals—a sixth sense, an aesthetic appetite. There was
a poet of the time who every year burned a copy of Mar-
tial as a sacrifice to Catullus—the object of his worship.
Another man of letters—a great Scholar—stretched on a