PART 1. CHAP. V. His efforts to arouse the western powers to concerted action against the common enemy had signally failed, while the Critical con- tide of invasion in the East had begun to threaten the walls tion of the eastern ein of Constantinople itself. In the opinion of Gibbon it was little more than a feeling of generosity in the foe that spared the imperial city when the crescent already gleamed from the walls of Adrianopolis'. An urgent summons had recalled Chrysoloras for a short period to Constantinople to receive Greek instructions, and what he then heard and witnessed appears to have convinced him that the fall of the capital could not much longer be averted. Unlike the majority of his countrymen in their exile, he had been led to renounce the distinctive tenets of the Greek Church, and had given additional proof of his orthodoxy by a treatise on the chief question in dispute-the Procession of the Holy Ghost. It He becomes was probably this fact, combined with his high reputation as a diplomatist, that now marked him out in the eyes of pope John XXII as an eminently fit person to accompany the papal delegates to the council of Constance, where it was designed that the union of the Churches of the East and the West should again become a subject of discussion. The Constance a project was one which commanded his warmest sympathies; and, apart from the religious aspect, the circumstances under which that council was convened must have had for every Greek a peculiar significance. It was summoned not by the pope, but by the emperor Sigismund'. For the first time, a convert to the Western Church the council of A delegate of the Pope. ne ipsorum studiorum vetus illa glo. Gibbon-Milman-Smith, vi 28. agitatm, divism, laceratæque religionis nostræ divino prope affectu permotus, pontificibus maximis, qui ipsins gravitatem, prudentiam et vitam, tanquam caleste oraculum venerabantur, concilii sententias, quantum in se fuit, suscipiendas fore, suadere conatus est. Et ut ceterorum bonorum judiciis adhæreret, omnem itineris longitudinem, frigora, hiemes, viarum a-peritates atque mortem, ri opus esset, perferre instituit. Qua eum, ut cogitarat, perfecta fui-nt, inveteratos Græcoruin errores ad Romanum religionem sua opera ac daligentia deduxisset.' Boerner, pp. 26-7. It was on this occasion that Sigismund declared himself, as rex Ro manus, to be super grammaticam. PART L the ruler of western Christendom had assumed the highest CHAP. prerogative of his imperial dignity, as the coequal or superior of the chief pontiff himself'. At the very time, therefore, that the eastern empire appeared on the eve of dissolution, its ival of the West was rising to the just level of its high deal; and to Chrysoloras,—who, as he gazed from the heights that surrounded Rome had half imagined he beheld again the city of his birth,-who had seen the literature of his native tongue, at the very time that it was dying out on the shores f the Bosporus, taking vigorous root on the banks of the Tiber,-it may well have seemed that the faith and the overeignty of Nova Roma were also summoned by no obscure or trivial portents to find their future home in the italian land. In sentiments like these we have a sufficient explanation of the readiness with which he accepted the task confided 'to his hands, and, though advanced in years, boldly faced the severities of a winter journey across the Alps to Constance: they serve also to explain the bitterness of the disappointment with which he witnessed the sud len breaking up of that memorable assembly. He was seized with death fear and died after a few days; the victim, according to Julianus, of grief rather than of disease. His remains received honorable interment within the precincts of the Dominican convent at Constance: and his epitaph-the grateful tribute of Poggio to his memory,-declared that he had acquired in Italy that lasting fame which it was no longer in the power of his native country to confer. His 1 It can hardly be said that upon any occasion, except the gathering of the council of Constance by Suns mard, did the emperor appar fling a truly international place,' Prof Fryce, I ly Roman Empire, 273'. Sed cum, prater suam of ni nem atque omnium bonorum ju lis m, them ortiva liberta tatia close watu v. leret, et ad unins molaritate a re la ta omnia, tandem[«® J* *tifex mas aum ad foram reddasata, asiduis febribas obsess an e-t Caucusque pout dies, dolore magis PART I. oration by Julianus. CHAP. V. epitaph was not the only memorial reared by the scholar to his memory. With the revival of the ancient literature there had been rekindled among the men of letters of that day much of the oratorical spirit of Greece and Rome, and by the fifteenth century it was rarely that any important public event was allowed to pass unaccompanied by some rhetorica! His funeral effusion'. Among such efforts the funeral oration held a conspicuous place; and on the death of Chrysoloras an oration of this kind was pronounced in Venice, where he had once taught with such signal success, by Andreas Julianus, a noble of that city. This composition, equally deserving of notice for its elegant Latinity and as a record of some interesting facts respecting the father of Greek learning in Italy, is still extant; and making all allowance for the hyperbole of a Ciceronian diction and the partiality of private friendship, we may conclude that Chrysoloras had earned in no ordinary degree, both by his public and private character, the esteem and admiration of his contemporaries. Guarino, b. 1370. & 1400. a teacher. Among the disciples of Chrysoloras Guarino was undoubtedly the one on whom the mantle of the master descended. His reputation as a teacher induced the authorities of the university of Ferrara to engage his services, leaving His fame as him to fix the amount of his own salary. Nor was thei liberality misplaced; for his fame soon attracted to the city learners from every country. Poggio preferred his instruction for his youthful son to any that Florence could offer; and his contemporaries were wont to apply to him the saying o Cicero respecting Isocrates, that more learned men had issued from his school than chieftains from the Trojan horse? Even Englishmen, little as learning was then in vogue in their country, were to be found among the hearers of Guarino. Of this number was the unfortunate John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, the author of various orations delivered before pop Pius II, and one of the earliest translators from the Latin into his native language,-Robert Fleming, the papal protho Eminent Favestimen among his pujuta notary, and author of the Lucubrationes Tiburtiane',-John CHAPY. Free, a lawyer of considerable eminence, whose performances as a translator from the Greek were sufficiently meritorious to Gra induce the Italians to claim them as the work of their celebrated countryman, Poggio Bracciolini',-John Gundorp, and William Gray, afterwards bishop of Ely. To the last named learning in England was indebted for an important ccession to its resources. On his return from Italy, Gray brought with him a collection of manuscripts, some of them of authors that had never before crossed the channel, and all of them well calculated to impart to the few scholars to be found among his countrymen a notion of the movement in progress in the Transalpine universities. His collection in- M cluded the letters of Petrarch, and numerous orations by Poggio, Aretino, and Guarino,-compositions that by their more classic diction and genuine admiration of antiquity could hardly fail to awaken a like spirit in the northern centres of learning; a new translation of the Timeus and another of the Euthyphron were a contribution to an extended knowledge of Plato; the Institutions of Lactantius, versions of the Golden Verses of Pythagoras (a favorite text-book at Cambridge in after years), hitherto unknown orations and treaises by Cicero and Quintilian, and many of the dis ourses of Seneca, were also important additions; while Jerome's Letter to Pammachius, on 'Origenisin,' is deserving of notice as the first instalment of a special literature which was shortly to give rise to a controversy of no ordinary significance. We have no fast lireet proof that bishop Gray was actuated by feelings of resent- to he ment towards the university like those which Baker, as we have already seen, attributes to bishop Fordham and bishop Morgan, it so far as the bequest of his valuable collection may be looked 1 Johnson, Life of Linacre, p. 91. * Thomæ Can, Vindicio Antiquit, food. Chrom, 11 331, ed. Hearne, Bentlam says, "being" jissessed I an ample fortune, her moved Ferrara, where he studied under tim of Veronn, with as grat et to himself as credit to his vashat; especially in the Greek and Hebu lan turges, His, of Tly Ca- Cata' 118 Codicum XSS. qui in PART L CHAP. V. upon as evidence the existence of such resentment is far from improbable. It is evident at least that his affection for his own college at Oxford exceeded his care for the university of his diocese, for his library was bequeathed to Balliol'; and it may easily be conjectured that the one or two scholars at Cambridge in those days to whom the destination of such a legacy appeared a matter of any interest, when they heard to whose keeping these treasures had been confided, observed that they might thank pope Martin v and the Ultramontanists for the loss sustained by their own university. Like Isocrates, Guarino also attained to an advanced and vigorous Old age of old age, which found him still busied on his literary labours. His productions were chiefly translations from the Greek; and only two years before his death, at the age of 88, he completed a translation of the Geography of Strabo3. Guarino. Leonardo Bruni 8.1-2 & 1443 Not less eminent than Guarino, though distinguished in a somewhat different manner, was Leonardo Bruni, known from the place of his birth as Aretino, and by his learned contemporaries as 'the modern Aristotle.' From him we date the commencement of a more intelligent study of Aristotle's writings, an improvement which the increasing critical faculty of the age rendered indispensable if the authority of the Stagirite were still to hold its ground. The conviction that forced itself upon Grosseteste and Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century was now the sentiment of every Italian Humanist. Even pope Pius II, though ignorant of Greek, was ready to declare that, if Aristotle were to come again. to life, he would be totally unable to recognise as his own the thoughts for which he was made responsible by his Latin interpreters. Among those who were attracted by the fame of Aretino, was cardinal Beaufort's great rival, Humphrey, duke He translates of Gloucester. He had already become acquainted with the rest of Aretino's translation of the Ethics, and he now besought him Gloucester. to give to the world a translation of the Politics,-a copy of which had recently been brought from Constantinople by Pallas de Strozzi. Aretino acceded to his request, and laying IT's trans lations of Aristotle. the Politics at Humphrey, duke of 1 Bentham says that he also built a good part of the college library. Hist. of Ely Cathedral, 176. Asia, c. 71. |