nother that it
was of the glossiest black. What foundation for the legend may really
have existed need not here be questioned. Let us rather use the _mythus_
as a parable of the ecstatic devotion which prompted the men of that age
to discover a form of unimaginable beauty in the tomb of the classic
world.

Then came the third age of scholarship--the age of the critics,
philologers, and printers. What had been collected by Poggio and Aurispa
had now to be explained by Ficino, Poliziano, and Erasmus. They began
their task by digesting and arranging the contents of the libraries.
There were then no short cuts of learning, no comprehensive lexicons, no
dictionaries of antiquities, no carefully prepared _thesauri_ of
mythology and history. Each student had to hold in his brain the whole
mass of classical erudition. The text and the canon of Homer, Plato,
Aristotle, and the tragedians had to be decided. Greek type had to be
struck. Florence, Venice, Basel, and Paris groaned with
printing-presses. The Aldi, the Stephani, and Froben toiled by night and
day, employing scores of scholars, men of supreme devotion and of mighty
brain, whose work it was to ascertain the right reading of sentences, to
accentuate, to punctuate, to commit to the press, and to place, beyond
the reach of monkish hatred or of envious time, that everlasting solace
of humanity which exists in the classics. All subsequent achievements in
the field of scholarship sink into insignificance beside the labors of
these men, who needed genius, enthusiasm, and the sympathy of Europe for
the accomplishment of their titanic task. Vergil was printed in 1470,
Homer in 1488, Aristotle in 1498, Plato in 1512. They then became the
inalienable heritage of mankind. But what vigils, what anxious
expenditure of thought, what agonies of doubt and expectation, were
endured by those heroes of humanizing scholarship, whom we are apt to
think of merely as pedants! Which of us now warms and thrills with
emotion at hearing the name of Aldus Manutius or of Henricus Stephanus
or of Johannes Froben? Yet this we surely ought to do; for to them we
owe in a great measure the freedom of our spirit, our stores of
intellectual enjoyment, our command of the past, our certainty of the
future of human culture.

This third age in the history of the Renaissance scholarship may be said
to have reached its climax in Erasmus; for by this time Italy had handed
on the torch of learning to the norther