letters. The galleys of her
merchants brought back manuscripts from the East as the most precious
portion of their freight. In the palaces of her nobles fragments of
classic sculpture ranged themselves beneath the frescoes of Ghirlandajo.
The recovery of a treatise of Cicero's or a tract of Sallust's from the
dust of a monastic library was welcomed by the group of statesmen and
artists who gathered in the Rucellai gardens with a thrill of enthusiasm.
Foreign scholars soon flocked over the Alps to learn Greek, the key of the
new knowledge, from the Florentine teachers. Grocyn, a fellow of New
College, was perhaps the first Englishman who studied under the Greek
exile, Chalcondylas; and the Greek lectures which he delivered in Oxford
on his return in 1491 mark the opening of a new period in our history.
Physical as well as literary activity awoke with the rediscovery of the
teachers of Greece; and the continuous progress of English science may be
dated from the day when Linacre, another Oxford student, returned from the
lectures of the Florentine Politian to revive the older tradition of
medicine by his translation of Galen.

[Sidenote: John Colet]

But from the first it was manifest that the revival of letters would take
a tone in England very different from the tone it had taken in Italy, a
tone less literary, less largely human, but more moral, more religious,
more practical in its bearings both upon society and politics. The
awakening of a rational Christianity, whether in England or in the
Teutonic world at large, begins with the Italian studies of John Colet;
and the vigour and earnestness of Colet were the best proof of the
strength with which the new movement was to affect English religion. He
came back to Oxford utterly untouched by the Platonic mysticism or the
semi-serious infidelity which characterized the group of scholars round
Lorenzo the Magnificent. He was hardly more influenced by their literary
enthusiasm. The knowledge of Greek seems to have had one almost exclusive
end for him, and this was a religious end. Greek was the key by which he
could unlock the Gospels and the New Testament, and in these he thought
that he could find a new religious standing-ground. It was this resolve of
Colet to throw aside the traditional dogmas of his day and to discover a
rational and practical religion in the Gospels themselves which gave its
peculiar stamp to the theology of the Renascence. His faith stood simply
o