The Cambridge Modern History. R. Nisbet Bain

Italy ever saw it lifted by the union of learning with genius. The zenith of Filelfo’s reputation may be placed at the time, in 1429, when, after teaching at Venice and Bologna, he came as professor to Florence. We have already seen that, after studying Greek at Constantinople, he had brought home with him a considerable store of classical manuscripts. He especially prided himself on a comprehensive knowledge of the Greek and Latin literatures, and on his facility in using both languages, alike in prose and in verse. At Florence, for a time at least, he often gave four lectures a day, taking (for instance) Cicero and Homer in the morning, followed by Terence and Thucydides in the afternoon. “My audience,” he says, “numbers every day four hundred persons,—perhaps more”; or perhaps less; for his own later recollections reduced the estimate by one half. At any rate the attendance was very large. There were youths (some from France, Germany, Spain, Cyprus), but also middle-aged or elderly men, including the foremost in Florence. This state of things did not, indeed, last long; for Filelfo had a fatal knack of rousing enmities. But it is a good illustration of what was possible for a very eminent humanist at that period. The method of teaching was determined by the peculiar conditions. Among Filelfo’s large audience there would be many, possibly a majority, who would regard the lecture mainly as a display of Latin eloquence, and who would not attempt to take notes. But there would also be many serious students, intent on recording what the lecturer said; and of these only a few would possess manuscripts of the author,—Cicero, for example,—whom he was expounding. After an introduction, Filelfo would therefore dictate a portion of Cicero’s text, which the students would transcribe. To this he would add a commentary, dealing with grammar, with the usage of words, and with everything in the subject-matter which needed to be explained or illustrated. Thus, at the end of such a course, the lecturer would have dictated a fully annotated edition of the classical book, or portion of a book, which he was treating; and the diligent student would have transcribed it. The migratory habits of the earlier humanists are partly to be explained by the fact that, when a lecturer had exhausted his existing stock of annotated texts, a change of scene and of audience would enable him to use them over again. A lecture by such a man as Filelfo had, in fact, a twofold quality. On the one hand, it was an exposition,—not of an advanced character, judged by modern standards, yet not too elementary for the conditions of the time. On the other, it was a recognised opportunity for the display of oratorical and dialectical skill. The audience were prepared for flashes of lively eloquence, quotations, epigrams, strokes of satire, panegyric, or invective. As scholarship advanced in Italy, the humanistic lecture became more sparing of irrelevant ornament; but it always preserved something of its old rhetorical character.

      Angelo Ambrogini, called Poliziano (Politianus) from his birthplace, Montepulciano, was born in 1454. His precocious abilities were shown in boyhood. In 1470 he earned the designation of “Homericus iuvenis” by translating four books of the Iliad (n-v) into Latin. At eighteen he published an edition of Catullus. He attracted the notice of Lorenzo de? Medici, who made him tutor to his children. Before he was thirty he became professor of Greek and Latin at Florence. He held that chair till his death, in 1494, at the age of forty. Like Filelfo, Politian covered in his lectures a wide field of literature in both the classical languages. But his standard of scholarship, best exemplified in his edition of the Pandects, was higher and more critical than that of any predecessor. A quality which distinguished him not less than his comprehensive scholarship was his rhetorical genius. Its characteristics were spontaneity, swiftness, fire, with a certain copiousness of matter, poured forth from a rich and prompt memory. This, indeed, even more than his learning, was the gift to which he owed his unique fame with his contemporaries. A vivid idea of his power as a rhetorician, which also helps us to imagine him as a lecturer, is given by four Latin poems comprised in his Sylvae. Each of these poems was written in order that he might recite it in his lecture-room as a prelude to a course of lectures. The first piece, entitled Nutricia, is an outline of the history of poetry from Homer to Boccaccio, with a peroration in praise of Lorenzo de1 Medici. It may justly be called one of the most noteworthy products of the Italian Renaissance. The facility and rapidity of the sonorous hexameters are extraordinary. Politian is said to have been, in all styles, a swift composer; and these verses convince the reader that they flowed forth. The matter is scarcely less remarkable. We observe that this great humanist is far more at home with the Latin poets than with the Greek. Thus, though no less than twenty-seven verses are given to Pindar, these turn wholly on the ancient traditions about his life; there is not a word that proves knowledge of his work or insight into his genius. The three masters of Greek tragedy are dismissed with one verse apiece, purporting to tell how each was killed;-Aeschylus, by a tortoise falling on his head,—Sophocles, by a shock of joy at the success of a play,—and Euripides, by wild dogs in Macedon. This brief passage is quaintly significant of the scant attention given to the Attic drama in the fifteenth century. But nothing in the poem is truer to the feeling of Italian humanism, or better indicates one of its limitations on the critical side, than the estimate of Homer and Virgil. Virgil, says Politian, ranks next to Homer; or, were not Homer the elder, might even rank above him (vel, ni veneranda senectus Obstiterit, jbrtasse prior). The second poem of the Sylvae, called Rusticus, was an introduction to the author’s lectures on Hesiod’s Works and Days, Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgws, and other bucolic poetry. The third, Manto, was a brilliant eulogy on Virgil. The fourth, Ambra, was prefatory to lectures on Homer. Politian’s Italian lyrics have been deemed by competent critics to possess high poetical merit, entitling him to a place between Petrarch and Ariosto. His Latin verse, brilliant as it is in rhetorical quality, wants the tact in selection of topics, and the artistic finish, which belong to poetry. But it is easy to conceive how powerful must have been the effect of those impetuous hexameters, when Politian, who was skilled in elocution and gifted with a voice of much charm, declaimed them in his crowded lecture-room at Florence, as a proem to discourses full of eloquence and learning. His audience was cosmopolitan, and the fame of his teaching was borne to every country in Europe. Politian’s work was cut short by death at an age when most men of comparable eminence in the annals of scholarship have been only at the outset of their career. But his function was to inspire; and his gifts were such that his brief span of life sufficed to render him one of the most influential personalities in the history of Italian humanism.

      The teaching by public lecture, of which Filelfo and Politian were such distinguished exponents, gave occupation, throughout the fifteenth century, to a long series of able men. It flourished at almost every considerable centre of Italian life. And, from the second quarter of the century onwards, the humanist professor had found an efficient ally in the schoolmaster, who prepared the ground for him. The Italian Renaissance brought forth no fairer fruit, and none fraught with more important consequences for the liberal culture of the world, than the school-training, based on the ideas of humanism, which took shape at that period. A place of special honour in the history of education is due to the founder of that system, Vittorino da Feltre. Born in 1378 at Feltre, a small town of Venetia, he went at eighteen to the University of Padua, then second in Italy only to the University of Bologna, and sharing with Pavia the distinction, still rare at that time in Universities, of being comparatively favourable to the New Learning. At Padua, Vittorino was the pupil of Giovanni di Conversino and afterwards of Gasparino da Barzizza, scholars whose important services to the study of Latin have already been noticed. Another Paduan teacher of that day whose influence Vittorino doubtless felt was Vergerius, the author of an essay on the formation of character (De Ingenuis Moribus) which remained a classic for two centuries, passing through some forty editions before the year 1600. The Renaissance was fertile in educational treatises; but this tractate was the clearest, as it was the earliest, statement of the principles on which humanistic training rested. Vittorino, after holding a chair of rhetoric at Padua, and then teaching privately at Venice, was invited by Gian Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, to undertake the tuition of his children. In 1425 he took up his residence in a villa assigned to him for that purpose at Mantua, where he remained till his death in 1446. Here he created a school of a type previously unknown.

      His aim was to develop the whole nature of his pupils, intellectual, moral, and physical; not with a view to any special calling, but so as to form good citizens and useful members of society, capable of bearing their part with credit in public and private life. For intellectual training he took the Latin classics as a basis; teaching them, however, not in the dry and meagre fashion generally prevalent in the medieval schools, where their meaning as literature was too often