The case was wholly different, he pleads, when the Early Church had to
fight its way among the heathen. Now--praised be Jesus Christ!--true
religion was strengthened, paganism destroyed, and the victorious Church
in possession of the hostile camp. It was now possible to touch and
study paganism almost (_fere_) without danger. Boccaccio, however, did
not hold this liberal view consistently. The ground of his apostasy lay
partly in the mobility of his character, partly in the still powerful
and widespread prejudice that classical pursuits were unbecoming in a
theologian. To these reasons must be added the warning given him in the
name of the dead Pietro Petroni by the monk Gioacchino Ciani to give up
his pagan studies under pain of early death. He accordingly determined
to abandon them, and was only brought back from this cowardly resolve by
the earnest exhortations of Petrarch, and by the latter's able
demonstration that humanism was reconcilable with religion.

There was thus a new cause in the world, and a new class of men to
maintain it. It is idle to ask if this cause ought not to have stopped
short in its career of victory, to have restrained itself deliberately,
and conceded the first place to purely national elements of culture. No
conviction was more firmly rooted in the popular mind than that
antiquity was the highest title to glory which Italy possessed.

There was a symbolical ceremony familiar to this generation of
poet-scholars which lasted on into the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, though losing the higher sentiment which inspired it--the
coronation of the poets with the laurel wreath. The origin of this
system in the Middle Ages is obscure, and the ritual of the ceremony
never became fixed. It was a public demonstration, an outward and
visible expression of literary enthusiasm, and naturally its form was
variable. Dante, for instance, seems to have understood it in the sense
of a half-religious consecration; he desired to assume the wreath in the
baptistery of San Giovanni, where, like thousands of other Florentine
children, he had received baptism. He could, says his biographer, have
anywhere received the crown in virtue of his fame, but desired it
nowhere but in his native city, and therefore died uncrowned. From the
same source we learn that the usage was till then uncommon, and was held
to be inherited by the ancient Romans from the Greeks. The most recent
source to which the practices could be ref