kest
monasteries of Germany and Britain.' His labours resulted in the
restoration of the Vatican Library with an endowment of five thousand
volumes; and he found time to complete the galleries for their reception,
though he could never hope to finish the rest of the palace. A great part
of his work was destroyed in 1527 by the rabble that 'followed the
Bourbon' to the sack of Rome; but his institution survived the temporary
disaster, and its losses were repaired by the energy of Sixtus V.

Pope Nicholas had no sympathy with the niggardly spirit that would have
kept the 'barbarians' in darkness. He opened his Greek treasure-house to
the inspection of the whole western world. Looking back to the crowd
round his chair at the Lateran or in his house near S^ta. Maria
Maggiore, we recognise a number of familiar figures. Perotti is
translating Polybius, and Aurispa explaining the Golden Verses; Guarini
enlarges the world's boundaries by publishing the geography of Strabo. An
old tract upon the Pope's munificence shows how the Eastern Fathers were
restored to a place of honour. Basil and Cyril were translated, and the
Pope obtained the _Commentary upon St. Matthew_, of which Erasmus made
excellent use in his Paraphrase: it was the book of which Aquinas wrote
that he would rather have a copy than be master of the city of Paris. The
Pope desired very strongly to read Homer in Latin verse, and had procured
a translation of the first book of the Iliad. Hearing that Philelpho had
arrived in Rome, he hoped that the work might be finished by a
master-hand, and to get a version of the whole Iliad and Odyssey he gave
a large retaining fee, a palazzo, and a farm in the Campagna, and made a
deposit of ten thousand pieces of gold to be paid on the completion of
the contract.

Joseph Scaliger, the supreme judge in his day of all that related to
books, said that of all these men of the Italian renaissance he only
envied three. One of course was Pico of Mirandula, a man of marvellous
powers, who rose as a mere youth to the highest place as a philosopher
and linguist. The next was Politian, equally renowned for hard
scholarship and for the sweetness and charm of his voluminous poems. The
third was the Greek refugee, Theodore of Gaza, so warmly praised by
Erasmus for his versatile talent; no man, it was said, was so skilled in
the double task of turning Greek books into Latin, and rendering Latin
into Greek.

We should feel inclined to brack