348 COSMOS. 



and chemical treatises of Dioscorides, tciid the cosmolooricai 



D 



fancies of Plato. The dialectics of Aristotle were blended by 

 the Arabs with the study of Physics, as in earlier times, in the 

 Christian mediaeval age, they were with that of theology. 

 Men borrowed from the ancients what they judged susceptible 

 of special application, but they were far removed from appre- 

 hending the spirit of Hellenism in its general character, from 

 penetrating to the depths of the organic structure of the lan- 

 guage, from deriving enjoyment from the poetic creations of 

 the Greek imagination, or of seeking to trace the marvelous 

 luxuriance displayed in the fields of oratory and historical 

 composition. 



Almost two hundred years before Petrarch and Boccacio, 

 John of Salisbury and the Platonic Abelard had already exer- 

 cised a favorable influence with reference to an acquaintance 

 with certain works of classical antiquity. Both possessed the 

 power of appreciating the charm of writings in which freedom 

 and order, nature and mind, were constantly associated togeth- 

 er ; but the influence of the aesthetic feeling awakened by them 

 vanished without leaving a trace, and the actual merit of 

 having prepared in Italy a permanent resting-place for the 

 muses exiled from Greece, and of having contributed most 

 powerfully to re-establish classical literature, belongs of right 

 to two poets, linked together by the closest ties of iriendship, 

 Petrarch and Boccacio. A monk of Calabria, Barlaam, who 

 had long resided in Greece under the patronage of the Em- 

 peror Andronicus, was the instructor of both.* They were 

 the first to begin to make a careful collection of Roman and 

 Greek manuscripts ; and a taste for a comparison of languages 

 had even been awakened in Petrarch, t whose philological acu- 

 men seemed to strive toward the attainment of a more general 

 contemplation of the universe. Emanuel Chrysoloras, who 

 was sent as Greek embassador to Italy and England (1391), 

 Cardinal Bessarion of Trebisonde, Gemistus Pletho, and the 

 Athenian Demetrius Chalcondylas, to whom we owe the first 

 printed edition of Homer, were all valuable promoters of the 

 study of the Greek writers. $ All these came from Greece 

 before the eventful taking of Constantinople (29th May, 1453) ; 

 Constantino Lascaris alone, whose forefathers had once sat on 

 the Byzantine throne, came later to Italy. He brought witb 



* Heereu, Gesch. der Classischen Litteratur, bd. i., s. 284-290. 

 t Klaproth, Memoires relatives a V Asie, t. iii., p. 113. 

 X The Florentine edition of Homer of 1488; but the first printed 

 Greek book was the grammar of Constantino Lascax'is, in 1476. 



