e recently discovered art of printing and its installation on a
sumptuous scale worthy of the center of Christian culture. His
successor, Sixtus IV, deserves the title of the founder of modern
Rome. Bridges, aqueducts, public buildings, libraries, churches--all
owe to his fostering care their restoration and renewed foundation. He
made it the purpose of his life to attract distinguished humanistic
scholars to his capital, and Rome became the metropolis of culture and
learning as well as the mother city of Christendom.

Under such popes it is no wonder that Rome and the cities of Italy
generally became the homes of art and culture, centers of the new
humanistic learning and the shelters of the scholars of the outer
world. The Italian universities entered on a period of intellectual
and educational development as glorious almost as the art movement
that characterized the time. As this was marked by the work of such
men as that universal genius Leonardo da Vinci, of Michael Angelo,
poet, painter, sculptor, architect; of Raphael, Titian, and Correggio,
whose contemporaries were worthy of them in every way, some idea can
be attained of the wonderful era that developed. No {20} wonder
scholars in every department of learning flocked to Italy for
inspiration and the enthusiasm bred of scholarly fellowship in such an
environment. From England came men like Linacre, Selling, Grocyn, and
Dean Colet; Erasmus came from the Netherlands, and Copernicus from
Poland. Copernicus there obtained that scientific training which was
later to prove so fruitful in his practical work as a physician and in
his scientific work as the founder of modern astronomy.

It may be as well to say at the beginning that even Copernicus was not
the first to suggest that the earth moved, and not the sun; and that,
curiously enough, his anticipator was another churchman, Nicholas of
Cusa, the famous Bishop of Brixen. Readers of Janssen's _History of
the German People_ will remember that the distinguished historian
introduces his monumental work by a short sketch of the career of
Cusanus, as he is called, who may be well taken as the typical
pre-Reformation scholar and clergyman. Cusa wrote in a
manuscript--which is still preserved in the hospital of Cues, or
Cusa--published for the first time by Professor Clemens in 1847: "I
have long considered that this earth can not be fixed, but moves as do
the other stars--_sed movetur ut aliae stellae_." What a curious