heretic at bay. With a detachment which would have been scarcely possible for a medieval spectator of similar antecedents, Poggio is able to contemplate Jerome simply as a man who is evincing heroic fortitude—and thus describes him in a letter to Lionardo Bruni:—"There he stood, undismayed, unfaltering, not merely indifferent to death, but ready to welcome it,—another Cato."
It was impossible that men penetrated by this new spirit, and for whom the new learning was the revelation of a new life, should not soon apply their ideas to the training of the young. Within fifty years after the death of Petrarch, we find a type of education developed which, in contrast with the medieval, may be called the humanistic. It is, in its essentials, a type which satisfied the western world for four hundred years; the generation has not yet passed away which first saw its claims seriously challenged; and its origins must always have for us more than an ordinary measure of historical interest. Among the great teachers of the earlier Renaissance, there is one who has a pre-eminent right to be regarded as the founder of this education, and of him a few words must be said here; I refer to Vittorino da Feltre.
Born in 1378 at Feltre, a small town in Venetia, he went at eighteen to the University of Padua, then second in Italy only to Bologna, and sharing with Pavia the distinction, still rare at that time in Universities, of being comparatively favourable to humanism. He there studied Latin under
