ists seem mere brutality; they lash their fallen
foes with what appears inhuman ferocity. But the truth is that the
struggle was not finished until well into the sixteenth century. Biel
of Tubingen, 'the last of the Schoolmen', lived till 1495. Between
1501 and 1515 a single printer, Wolff of Basle, produced five massive
volumes of the _Summae_ of mediaeval Doctors. Through the greater
part, therefore, of Erasmus' life the upholders of the old systems and
ideals, firmly entrenched by virtue of possession, succeeded in
maintaining their supremacy in the schools.

Between the two periods of the revival of learning, the Italian and
the Transalpine, a marked line is drawn by the invention of printing,
_c._ 1455: when the one movement had run half its course, the other
scarcely begun. The achievements of the press in the diffusion of
knowledge are often extolled; and some of the resulting good and evil
is not hard to see. But the paramount service rendered to learning by
the printer's art was that it made possible a standard of critical
accuracy which was so much higher than what was known before as to be
almost a new creation. When books were manuscripts, laboriously
written out one at a time, there could be no security of identity
between original and copy; and even when a number of copies were made
from the same original, there was a practical certainty that there
would be no absolute uniformity among them. Mistakes were bound to
occur; not always at the same point, but here in one manuscript, there
in another. Or again, when two unrelated copies of the same book were
brought together, there was an antecedent probability that examination
would reveal differences: so that in general it was impossible to feel
that a fellow-scholar working on the same author was using the same
text.

Even with writers of one's own day uniformity was hardly to be
attained. Not uncommonly, as a mark of attention, an author revised
manuscript copies of his works, which were to be presented to friends;
and besides correcting the copyists' errors, might add or cut out or
alter passages according to his later judgement. Subsequent copies
would doubtless follow his revision, and then the process might be
repeated; with the result that a reader could not tell to what stage
in the evolution of a work the text before him might belong: whether
it represented the earliest form of composition or the final form
reached perhaps many years afterwards. To