PART I. by Linacre at Oxford and by Erasmus at Cambridge, and CHAP. V. long continued to hold its ground against formidable rivals. Aretino has left on record the feelings with which he hastened to join the circle. He was at that time occupied in studying the civil law; but now,' he exclaimed to himself, 'it was in his power to gain a far higher knowledge, an acquaintance with Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes, with all those poets, philosophers, and orators, in short, of whom he had so often heard. Could he possibly let slip so glorious an opportunity? For seven hundred years no one in Italy had really understood the Greek language, though through that language well nigh all knowledge had been handed down to men. Of doctors of civil law there was plenty, of whom he might learn at any time, but of teachers of Greek this was the only one'.' Rome. of his life. Chrysoloras taught not only at Florence but also at Ilis visit to Venice, Padua, Milan, and Rome; and from the last city he addressed to his relative, John Chrysoloras, that graceful letter wherein he describes the resemblance of the City of the Seven Hills to the City of the Golden Horn, and tells how, as he gazed from each surrounding eminence, he fancied himself again in his native city, until his eye was fain to seek out his own home with its cypresses and hanging garden'. In such useful but tranquil labours he would, it seems, closing years have been well content to pass the remainder of his days, had he not suddenly been called away to duties of a more arduous character. The closing scene in his career, though less directly relevant to the progress of letters, is deserving of careful study as affording a very apt illustration of the state of the political and religious world at that time. If we may trust the account given by Julianus, the illustrious exile appears, in his latter years, to have ceased to hope for the country of his birth, and his aims and sympathies had begun to centre in the land that had afforded him so generous a reception, and seemed destined to so glorious a future. 1 Muratori Scriptores, XIX 920; Hody, pp. 28-30. 2 Codinus, De Antiquitatibus Constantinop., quoted by Boerner, p. 23. 3 Nam cum Græcos nihil aut parum literis suis animum advertere sentiret, easque sensim sinistra rerum ac temporum varietate extingui cognosceret, PART I. CHAP. V. His efforts to arouse the western powers to concerted action against the common enemy had signally failed, while the Critical con- tide of invasion in the East had begun to threaten the walls dition of the eastern em pire. of Constantinople itself. In the opinion of Gibbon it was little more than a feeling of generosity in the foe that spared the imperial city when the crescent already gleamed from the walls of Adrianopolis'. An urgent summons had recalled Chrysoloras for a short period to Constantinople to receive Greek instructions, and what he then heard and witnessed appears to have convinced him that the fall of the capital could not much longer be averted. Unlike the majority of his countrymen in their exile, he had been led to renounce the distinctive tenets of the Greek Church, and had given additional proof of his orthodoxy by a treatise on the chief question in dispute the Procession of the Holy Ghost. It was probably this fact, combined with his high reputation as a diplomatist, that now marked him out in the eyes of pope John XXII as an eminently fit person to accompany the papal delegates to the council of Constance, where it was designed that the union of the Churches of the East and the West should again become a subject of discussion. The Constance as project was one which commanded his warmest sympathies2; and, apart from the religious aspect, the circumstances under which that council was convened must have had for every Greek a peculiar significance. It was summoned not by the pope, but by the emperor Sigismund. For the first time, He becomes a convert to the Western Church. He attends the council of a delegate of the Pope. ne ipsorum studiorum vetus illa glo- 1 Gibbon-Milman-Smith, vIII 28. agitatæ, divisæ, laceratæque religionis nostræ divino prope affectu permotus, pontificibus maximis, qui ipsius gravitatem, prudentiam et vitam, tanquam cæleste oraculum venerabantur, concilii sententias, quantum in se fuit, suscipiendas fore, suadere conatus est. Et ut ceterorum bonorum judiciis adhæreret, omnem itineris longitudinem, frigora, hiemes, viarum asperitates atque mortem, si opus esset, perferre instituit. Quæ cum, ut cogitarat, perfecta fuissent, inveteratos Græcorum errores ad Romanam religionem sua opera ac diligentia deduxisset.' Boerner, pp. 26-7. 3 It was on this occasion that Sigismund declared himself, as rex Romanus, to be super grammaticam. PART I. the ruler of western Christendom had assumed the highest CHAP. V. prerogative of his imperial dignity, as the coequal or superior of the chief pontiff himself1. At the very time, therefore, that the eastern empire appeared on the eve of dissolution, its rival of the West was rising to the just level of its high ideal; and to Chrysoloras,-who, as he gazed from the heights that surrounded Rome had half imagined he beheld again the city of his birth,-who had seen the literature of his native tongue, at the very time that it was dying out on the shores of the Bosporus, taking vigorous root on the banks of the Tiber, it may well have seemed that the faith and the sovereignty of Nova Roma were also summoned by no obscure or trivial portents to find their future home in the Italian land. Constance. In sentiments like these we have a sufficient explanation of the readiness with which he accepted the task confided to his hands, and, though advanced in years, boldly faced the severities of a winter journey across the Alps to Constance: they serve also to explain the bitterness of the disappointment with which he witnessed the sudden breaking up of that memorable assembly. He was seized with His death at fear and died after a few days; the victim, according to Julianus, of grief rather than of disease. His remains received honorable interment within the precincts of the Dominican convent at Constance: and his epitaph,-the grateful tribute of Poggio to his memory,-declared that he had acquired in Italy that lasting fame which it was no longer in the power of his native country to confer. His 1 It can hardly be said that upon any occasion, except the gathering of the council of Constance by Sigismund, did the emperor appear filling a truly international place." Prof. Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, 2533. Sed cum, præter suam opinionem atque omnium bonorum judicium, communem omnium libertatem obsessam videret, et ad unius voluntatem redacta omnia, tandemque pontificem suum ad fugam redactum, assiduis febribus obsessus est, paucosque post dies, dolore magis urgente quam morbo, excessit e vita.' PART I. oration by Julianus. CHAP. V. epitaph was not the only memorial reared by the scholar to his memory. With the revival of the ancient literature there had been rekindled among the men of letters of that day much of the oratorical spirit of Greece and Rome, and by the fifteenth century it was rarely that any important public event was allowed to pass unaccompanied by some rhetorical His funeral effusion'. Among such efforts the funeral oration held a conspicuous place; and on the death of Chrysoloras an oration of this kind was pronounced in Venice, where he had once taught with such signal success, by Andreas Julianus, a noble of that city. This composition, equally deserving of notice for its elegant Latinity and as a record of some interesting facts respecting the father of Greek learning in Italy, is still extant; and making all allowance for the hyperbole of a Ciceronian diction and the partiality of private friendship, we may conclude that Chrysoloras had earned in no ordinary degree, both by his public and private character, the esteem and admiration of his contemporaries. Guarino, a teacher. Among the disciples of Chrysoloras, Guarino was undoubtedly the one on whom the mantle of the master descended. His reputation as a teacher induced the authorities of the university of Ferrara to engage his services, leaving His fame as him to fix the amount of his own salary. Nor was their liberality misplaced; for his fame soon attracted to the city learners from every country. Poggio preferred his instruction for his youthful son to any that Florence could offer; and his contemporaries were wont to apply to him the saying of Cicero respecting Isocrates, that more learned men had issued from his school than chieftains from the Trojan horse'. Even Englishmen, little as learning was then in vogue in their country, were to be found among the hearers of Guarino. Of this number was the unfortunate John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, the author of various orations delivered before pope Pius II, and one of the earliest translators from the Latin into his native language,-Robert Fleming, the papal protho Eminent Englishmen among his pupils. 1 For an account of the different forms which this spirit assumed, see Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance, 180-7. 2 This however was a kind of stock compliment at this period: Maffei de Volterra applies it to John of Ravenna, Platina to Bessarion. PART I. brought by England. notary, and author of the Lucubrationes Tiburtiana',-John CHAP. V. Free, a lawyer of considerable eminence, whose performances William as a translator from the Greek were sufficiently meritorious to Gray. induce the Italians to claim them as the work of their celebrated countryman, Poggio Bracciolini',-John Gundorp, and William Gray, afterwards bishop of Ely. To the last named learning in England was indebted for an important accession to its resources. On his return from Italy, Gray brought with him a collection of manuscripts, some of them of authors that had never before crossed the channel, and all of them well calculated to impart to the few scholars to be found among his countrymen a notion of the movement in progress in the Transalpine universities. His collection in- Mss. cluded the letters of Petrarch, and numerous orations by Grand Poggio, Aretino, and Guarino, -compositions that by their more classic diction and genuine admiration of antiquity could hardly fail to awaken a like spirit in the northern centres of learning; a new translation of the Timaus and another of the Euthyphron were a contribution to an extended knowledge of Plato; the Institutions of Lactantius, versions of the Golden Verses of Pythagoras (a favorite text-book at Cambridge in after years), hitherto unknown orations and treatises by Cicero and Quintilian, and many of the discourses of Seneca, were also important additions; while Jerome's Letter to Pammachius, on 'Origenism,' is deserving of notice as the first instalment of a special literature which was shortly to give rise to a controversy of no ordinary significance. We have no His collection direct proof that bishop Gray was actuated by feelings of resent- to Balliol ment towards the university like those which Baker, as we have already seen, attributes to bishop Fordham and bishop Morgan, but so far as the bequest of his valuable collection may be looked 1 Johnson, Life of Linacre, p. 91. Thomæ Caii, Vindicia Antiquit. Acad. Oxon. 11 334, ed. Hearne. 3 Bentham says, 'being possessed of an ample fortune, he removed to Ferrara, where he studied under Guarini of Verona, with as great benefit to himself as credit to his master; especially in the Greek and Hebrew languages. Hist. of Ely Ca- 4 Catalogus Codicum MSS. qui in bequeathed College. |