ON THE REVIVAL OF LITERATURE. 



35S 



gary ; while Italy, whose most renowned scholars had found an asylum at 

 Constantinople, upon its general ravage by the Goths, now offered, in re- 

 turn, to the scholars of Constantinople an asylum from Turkish fury and 

 oppression ; thus enabhng the elegant and accomplished Greeks, a second 

 time, to give letters to Europe ; at this period to the modern world, as they 

 had done two thousand years before to the ancient. 



, Several of the Italian governments had, indeed, for half a century begun 

 to feel the importance of literature and science, and consequently to offer 

 protection and patronage to scholars of every description. Florence, 

 Naples, and Ferrara are particularly entitled to this eulogy ; and, in a 

 somewhat inferior degree, Venice, Urbino, Mantua, and Milan. It was a 

 growing spirit, and a growing patronage ; till, at length, upon the intro- 

 duction of Giovanni de' Medici, into the college of cardinals, in 1490, 

 and more especially upon his election to the pontificate, in 1613, Rome 

 surpassed every other state in the splendid and extensive encouragement 

 it afforded to wit and wisdom of every kind, (with the lamentable excep- 

 tion of that it ought chiefly to have prized,) but especially to classical 

 literature and the fine arts. 



III. The Latin tongue was, at this time, so far revived as to become 

 cultivated and understood in all its elegancies ; and Dante, Petrarch, 

 Boccacio, Trissino, Sanazzaro, Ariosto, and a bright galaxy of other 

 writers, too extensive to be enumerated, had progressively given a charac- 

 ter and almost a mature polish to modern Italian. But a knowledge of 

 Greek, the master-tongue of the world, of Attic eloquence and refine- 

 ment, was but very hmited and imperfect, amidst the best scholars of the 

 day ; and hence, as I have already observed, the fugitive scholars of Con- 

 stantinople were hailed in almost every part of Italy, and especially by the 

 splendid and illustrious family of the Medici, first of Florence, and after- 

 wards at Rome. The directors, indeed, of the early studies of Leo X., 

 or Giovanni de' Medici, as he was then called, were partly drawn from 

 this well-spring of genuine taste and genius ; Demetrius Chalcondyles, 

 and Petrus ^Egineta, both native Greeks, being among the more promi- 

 nent of his tutors. While, in the very first year of his election to the 

 pontificate, he founded a Greek institute of great extent and magnificence 

 in the centre of the apostolic see ; gave a general invitation to young and 

 noble Greeks to quit their country, and take up their residence under his 

 protection ; purchased for the accommodation of these illustrious strangers 

 the noble palace of the Cardinal of Sion, on the Esquilian hill, which he 

 splendidly endowed as an academy ; and, as far as their talents or educa- 

 tion fitted them for the purpose, inducted them into the Roman church, 

 and conferred upon them some of its highest dignities and distinctions. 



IV. Nothing could occur more auspiciously to the zeal and splendour 

 with which this munificent and sumptuous pontiff was prosecuting the 

 revival of literature than the invention of printing ; — -that wonderful dis- 

 covery which has since effected, and which is so well calculated to effect, 

 the most important revolutions among mankind : the noblest art of man, 

 next to the invention of letters ; the winged commerce of the mind ; the 

 impregnable breast plate of freedom. We may fairly call it an invention, 

 even at the period here adverted to, since, though the same art, as well in 

 the form of stereotype or wooden blocks, and of moveable type, had at 

 this time been in use in China ever since the close of the ninth century, 

 md was encouraged by the patronage of the Emperor Teen Fob,* there 



* Morrison's Philological View of China, p. 27. 



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