another golden age of letters and art. That vision dawned upon Petrarch in a peaceful time, when, in his poem "Africa," he predicted that the new love for the Muses would rival the old; and it continued to cheer students amidst all the foreign invasions and intestine troubles which crowded upon Italy two centuries later. After the sack of Rome in 1527, and when the condition of Italy on every side was deplorable, an accomplished scholar, Marcantonio Flaminio, sent to his patron, Alessandro Farnese, a collection of Latin poems by natives of Lombardy, which was then the region in which letters chiefly flourished. In some verses which accompanied this gift, he cries: "Happy, too happy, are our days, which have given birth to a Catullus, a Tibullus, a Horace, and a Virgil of their own!"
The Italian humanists' cult of style was thus connected with a larger aim, that of regaining a lost culture, regarded as ancestral; and it did a work of lasting value for European literature. But we owe to them much more than that. We owe to them, for instance, that conception, ever present to the stronger men in their ranks, of classical antiquity as a whole. The outlook of the greater humanists was a wide one. Filelfo, already mentioned, was a typical scholar of the fifteenth century: when he was professor at Florence, about 1428, he lectured in the morning on Cicero, then on Livy, or Homer: in the afternoon, on Terence, followed by Thucydides. Meanwhile, among other private labours, he translated into Latin Aristotle's "Rhetoric," some
