he fixed
types of medieval manhood, minted by authority, and taught to distrust
conscience, when it was their own, and to trust it only in others,
Seneca was an oracle. For he is the classic of mental discipline,
vigilant self-study, and the examination of conscience. It is under
these influences that the modern type of individual man took shape.
The action of religion, by reason of the divided Church, and the
hierarchy in partibus, was at a low point; and no age has been so
corrupt, so barbarous in the midst of culture. The finished
individual of the Renaissance, ready for emergencies equal to either
fortune, relying on nothing inherited, but on his own energy and
resource, began badly, little recking rights of others, little caring
for the sanctity of life.

Very early in the first or Latin phase of the revival, people
suspected that familiarity with the classics would lead to admiration
for paganism. Coluccio Salutato, who had been Florentine Secretary
from the time of Petrarca, and is a classical writer of Latin letters,
had to defend the new learning against the rising reproach of
irreligion; and the statue of Virgil was ignominiously removed from
the market-place of the town which his birth has made illustrious, as
a scandal to good men. Petrarca never became a Greek scholar. He
felt the defect. To write beautiful Latin was nothing, unless there
was more to say than men already knew. But the Latin classics were no
new discovery. The material increase of knowledge was quite
insufficient to complete the type of an accomplished man. The great
reservoir of ideas, of forgotten sciences, of neglected truth,
remained behind. Without that, men would continue to work at a
disadvantage, to fight in the dark, and could never fulfil the
possibilities of existence. What was impatiently felt as the medieval
eclipse came not from the loss of elegant Latin, but from the loss of
Greek. All that was implied in the intended resurrection of antiquity
depended on the revival of Greek studies. Because Petrarca possessed
the culture of his time beyond all men, he was before them all in
feeling what it needed most. Knowledge of truth, not casual and
partial, but as complete and certain as the remaining civilisation
admitted, would have to be abandoned, if Latin was still to be the
instrument and the limit. Then the new learning would not be strong
enough to break down the reliance on approved authors, the tyranny of
gre