centre. The greatest man of this time,—the greatest genius of the literary renaissance in Italy,—was Angelo Poliziano; he died in 1494, when Erasmus was twenty-seven.
With Erasmus a new period opens. Two things broadly distinguish him, as a scholar, from the men before and after him. First, he was not only a refined humanist, writing for the fastidious few, and prizing no judgment but theirs; he took the most profitable authors of antiquity,—profitable in a moral as well as a literary sense,—chose out the best things in them,—and sought to make these things widely known,—applying their wisdom or wit to the circumstances of his own day. Secondly, in all his work he had an educational aim,—and this of the largest kind. The evils of his age,—in Church, in State, in the daily lives of men,—seemed to him to have their roots in ignorance,—ignorance of what Christianity meant,—ignorance of what the Bible taught,—ignorance of what the noblest and most gifted minds of the past, whether Christian or pagan, had contributed to the instruction of the human race. Let true knowledge only spread, and under its enlightening and humanising influence a purer religion and a better morality will gradually prevail. Erasmus was a man of the world; but with his keen intellect, so quickly susceptible to all impressions, he made the mistake, not uncommon for such temperaments, of overrating the rapidity with which intellectual influences permeate the masses of mankind. However, no one was ever more per-
