and painful efforts, but each advance, as it was made, was secured.

The position may be further illustrated by comparing the first
productions of the press on either side of the Alps: in the early
days, before the export trade had developed, and when books were
produced mainly for the home market. The Germans who brought the art
down into Italy, Sweynheym and Pannartz at Rome, Wendelin and Jenson
at Venice, printed scarcely anything that was not classical: Latin
authors and Latin translations from the Greek. Up in the North the
first printers of Germany, Fust and Schoeffer at Mainz, Mentelin at
Strasburg, rarely overstepped the boundaries of the mediaeval world
that was passing away or the modern that was taking its place.

The appearance of the _Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum_ in 1515 exposed
the scholastic teachers and their allies in the Church to such
widespread ridicule that it is not easy for us now to realize the
position which those dignitaries still held when Erasmus was young.
The stream of contempt poured upon them by the triumphant humanists
obscures the merit of their system as a gigantic and complete engine
of thought. Under its great masters, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas,
Duns Scotus, scholasticism had been rounded into an instrument capable
of comprehending all knowledge and of expressing every refinement of
thought; and, as has been well said, the acute minds that created it,
if only they had extended their inquiries into natural science, might
easily have anticipated by centuries the discoveries of modern
days.[39] In expressing their distinctions the Schoolmen had thrown to
the winds the restraints of classical Latin and the care of elegance;
and with many of them language had degenerated into jargon. But in
their own eyes their position was unassailable. Their philosophy was
founded on Aristotle; and while they were proud of their master, they
were prouder still of the system they had created in his name: and
thus they felt no impulse to look backwards to the past.

[39] Cf. F.G. Stokes, _Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum_, 1909, p.
xvii.

In the matter of language they had been led by a spirit of reaction.
The literature of later classical times had sacrificed matter to form;
and the schools had been dominated by teachers who trained boys to
declaim in elegant periods on any subject whatever, regardless of its
content; thus carrying to an extreme the precepts with which the great