and the versatile energy which animated the Italian Renaissance for two centuries sprang from a deep and earnest conviction that the recovered literatures were not only models of style, but treasure-houses of wisdom, guides of life, witnesses to a civilisation higher than any which could then be found upon the earth. Even in the early years of the sixteenth century, when the best energies of the movement had in Italy been spent, and when Italian humanism was being narrowed down from the ample scholarship of Politian to the Ciceronian purism of Bembo, this fundamental belief remained unaltered.
One illustration may be cited. In the year 1508, a manuscript containing the first six (or, as then constituted, the first five) books of the Annals of Tacitus, said to have been found in the Westphalian monastery of Corbey, was brought to Rome, and was acquired by Giovanni de' Medici, who, five years later, became Leo X. It is the only manuscript of those books which exists, and is now in the Laurentian Library at Florence. One of Leo's earliest acts, after he became Pope, was to entrust the printing of this codex to a scholar of note, Filippo Beroaldo the younger, whose edition was published at Rome in 1515. As a reward to the editor, Leo conferred upon him a privilege for the sale and reprinting of the work. In the brief which grants this privilege, and which is prefixed to the edition, Leo expresses his estimate of humanistic studies. "We have been accustomed," he says, "even from our early years, to think that nothing
