Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/526

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speeches of Lysias, extracts from Xenophon, and some of Plutarch's "Lives." Politian edited Catullus in his youth, and the Pandects of Justinian in his riper age: published notes on Ovid and Statius, on Suetonius, the younger Pliny, Quintilian and other Latin authors; made Latin translations from Hippocrates, Plato, Herodian, and Galen. Erasmus became to northern Europe the prophet of this comprehensive humanism in its educational and also in its more popular aspects. Such largeness of range and view, albeit obtained at some sacrifice of other qualities, is, in its own way, an intellectual gain.

To another service of the humanists, one which is more apt to be forgotten, it must suffice to allude in passing,—I mean what they did for erudition, as distinguished from literary scholarship. Their commentaries, their works on antiquities of every kind, have mostly been absorbed or superseded; but in these provinces also the later learning must acknowledge a vast debt. Flavio Biondo, who died in 1463, deserves to be remembered as one of the chief founders of Roman archæology, in virtue of his threefold work, "Roma Instaurata," "Roma Triumphans," and "Italia Illustrata." The study of Latin epigraphy, again, received a notable benefit from Jacopo Mazochi and his collaborator Albertini, who, building partly on earlier collections, published in 1521 their "Inscriptions of Rome." It was under the direct influence of humanism that the first Roman Museums of antiquities and