THE LEGACY OF THE GREEKS 159 



it produced something of that same sense of aridity and de- 

 pression and a sterile and profitless atheism which came to 

 the earlier day. Faith crumbled, we know not why perhaps 

 more from physiological than intellectual reasons. Religion 

 ceased to satisfy men's needs, and the new Evangel had not 

 come. At the end a pope, Urban VIII., wrote upon the tomb 

 of his brother : Hie jacet pulvis et cinis ; postea nihil ; " dust 

 and ashes, and in the after nothing ! " 



But even while this disillusioned pontiff, like another Cohelet, 

 or whoever may have been the author of Ecclesiastes, was thus 

 writing down the vanity of life, the futility of human concerns, 

 to the world about him a marvellous awakening had come. 

 It had come subtly, unobtrusively, without that any man knew 

 why, or that the most of men were aware. At the opening of 

 the quattro cento, into a cup of exquisite chasing Dante had 

 poured the alembic of the new Italian tongue. Fleeing before 

 the invading Turk, the exodus of the pedants into Italy had 

 brought resurrection to the immortal works of Greece. 

 Petrarch and Boccaccio, fired with enthusiasm for the new 

 study, had made ancient learning again the fashion. From 

 Marco Polo, from Mandeville, and other travellers had come 

 dazzling tales of unknown lands. The spirit of adventure 

 stirred anew. 



At the same time trade and commerce were flourishing as 

 they had not flourished in centuries. The northerly lands of 

 Europe were becoming rich. To the leisured class came time 

 to learn, and with it the vanity to affect tastes and cultivate 

 aptitudes which lifted them yet a little further from the crowd. 



The intellectual movement was widespread. The introduc- 

 tion and prevalent use of gunpowder resulted at last in a demand 

 for a theory of explosions. A mingled chemistry and alchemy 

 had been imported from the Moors. The zest for inquiry ran 

 into channels the most diverse. In Leonardo da Vinci was 

 incarnated one of those multifarious minds which appear once 

 in a century or more. Painter, poet, engineer, strategist, in- 

 ventor of canal locks, a student of shells and stones, of plants 

 and trees, of pigments and the effects of light, he became the 

 founder of half-a-dozen sciences. 



To still larger results, in the far-off wilds of Great Britain, 

 in the solitude of the cloister, and persecuted as a necromancer, 

 Roger Bacon had toiled at the resuscitation of physical science. 



